How to Back Up a Hard Drive

To make backing up your hard drive as easy as possible, you
should set up a backup profile. Most PCs with Microsoft
Windows XP have a program called Windows XP Back Up
installed as a useful application. Once you open the
application, you can follow the instructions from the backup
wizard and decide what exactly you wish to back up. If your
computer's hard drive is split into separate drives or
partitioned, you can chose to copy back to the original
drive. This should safely store your data and be retrievable
should your hard drive crash -- though if you have corrupted
data, this option may not be as helpful.

Macintosh computers with Mac OS 10.5 or later have a similar
application called Time Machine. This application allows you
to back up data and set up a profile that will allow you to
save it on the machine or export it to an external hard
drive.

Both of these applications give you the option of setting up
a schedule to perform backups. This allows you to back up
data regularly should you forget. What's more, these
applications can send you e-mail alerts when performing
backups if the system experiences a malfunction. You don't
have to use either of these programs, however; there are lots
of off-the-shelf backup solutions available for both Windows
and Mac, though they come at an additional cost, of course.

Once you've mastered how to back up data on your computer,
you've taken a big step toward protecting your important
information. Now let's look into some external places you can
store that important data to be able to retrieve it even if
you do lose your primary hard drive. In the next section,
we'll explore some devices and methods you can use in your
defense against the unknown mysteries of hard drive
failures.