Backing Up is Hard to Do

It doesn’t have to be that way, and we all know backups are like machine guns — better to have one and not need it than to need it and not have it. My primary drive has three partitions — an active partition, one for .iso files and another for uninstalled software. Burning all this to DVD would take ages, and I don’t know how many blanks. Problem: How do I get a complete backup in an immediately usable format? I installed a removable drive rack in the slave position on my IDE cable. My primary drive is at the end (master) and it’s jumpered as cable select. I then put two identical hard drives, also jumpered as cable select, in removable drive trays. Every Sunday I slide the oldest backup tray into the rack and boot the PC from a copy of The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. This CD is a must-have for any PC tech-type, but the specific tool I’m using in this case is RawCopy, a program that copies a disk as a raw image from one drive directly to another. It’s very fast, and in 20 minutes or less I’ve got Drive 0 imaged to Drive 1. Now, if things go very bad and my primary drive “just breaks“, I can remove it and replace it with my most recent (no more than a week old) backup drive, and then via Mozy (see my article on Ransomware and Mozy HERE) get my most recent (backed up several times a day) data files. In an hour or less I’ve gotten everything back to the way it was prior to the disaster. The removable rack and one tray cost me about $22, and additional trays are under $10. The IDE drives are getting dirt cheap — Geeks.com has 120G drives for $41, and RawCopy is free.