So you have a friend that just lost EVERYTHING because their computer crashed. Well that's no big surprise considering the probability of a hard drive crash is
100%. This statistic surprises a lot of people but in reality if everyone knew how often this happens backups would be priority number one. If you stop and think about it your
hard drive is nothing more than a high tech record player. Inside its small metal case it houses some magnesium disks that store data and an arm much like on a record player that reads and writes that data. Having such a primitive design makes failure inevitable because the smallest particle of dust can crash a hard drive and I know the inside of most computers is a dust heaven.
So what do we do now that we know our hard drives are going to crash?? Well thankfully there are many ways to backup everything on your system and they have gotten pretty cheap. We have recently setup a few of our machines in the office to have automatic backups using some
Symantec Software and
Western Digital External Hard Drives.
To do this yourself we need two things. First thing is a Symantec software called
Norton Ghost 12.0, this is the software we are going to use to automatically backup our systems. The second thing we need is a
Western Digital External Hard Drive. I choose
Western Digital because of their outstanding reliability and fair price. When purchasing your external hard drive try and stay above 250GB depending on how much you are backing up. I recommend this
product.
After installing
Norton Ghost, you need to set it to automatically backup your system while you sleep. To do this press "Run or Manage Backups" under the tasks menu. When you do this you will see the "Easy Setup" window open. From here you can click each of the links highlighted in blue to change these options. The first two sections are "Back Up my
Computer" and "Back Up
My Documents". The backup computer section shows that it will back up your entire main hard drive at whatever time is scheduled and the My documents section shows it will backup your My Documents folder. I recommend changing the schedule time for both to 1am or 2am while your sleeping so it does not conflict with work. The last area to change is the
Backup Destination. We want to point the backup destination to your new external hard drive. This way everynight while you sleep your computer will automatically backup all of your files to your new hard drive. Now go ahead and press ok and run a backup to make sure everything is setup correctly.
The final step is to give your self a big pat on the back for saving your business in the future.
-Real Estate Technology Blog
