Hello there! After a long time, I will be talking about making a hard drive backup, which is essential for many people, (including myself) as everyone knows how bad it would be to lose your important work files or anything important in that sense. Backing your hard drive is up is a simple thing and it can be done in many ways with many different softwares. I will show you a few methods to walk through this simple process.
First things first, you will need another hard drive that you can store the backup on, since the whole point of making a hard drive backup is the fact that if your primary hard drive is unreachable, you can access your files via the second hard drive.
First way to do this is a fairly simple, and orthodox way. A copying script will do just fine if you aren't looking for anything fancy, and it works pretty well. All you need to do is to open a Notepad up and copy these lines:
cd X:\
xcopy X: Y:\backupbatch /s /e /t /h /D
Where X: is the hard drive you want to back up from (for ordinary users, usually C:), and Y is the destination hard drive where you will be forming your hard drive backup. Now save the notepad file as a .bat (your file name should be backupbatch according to this example), which will make this a batch file which you can run at will. Whenever you run the batch file, the computer will copy all the files you have from X to Y. You might say the process will take too long to do this every time, but I got good news for you! The /D switch enables the script to only copy the files which have been changed, so it won't copy everything all over if they are untouched. You can even automate this process with a software called Xecutor. What it does is, in simple words, running your script every time before you shut your computer down. You can also use the scheduling software of Windows to customize the timing closer to your liking. (I won't go into detail)
The second way of doing this would be to use a commercial software which are commonly used by most people who want to make a hard drive backup. I would suggest Paragon Backup & Recovery which you can find here, as it is the most complete of the backup programs I've used. The software comes with many features which makes life easy for you when you want to make a hard drive backup.
Using this software is pretty straight forward, all you need to do is to run the program, go to the Backup & Recovery menu, and click Smart Backup. After that, click Disk or Partitions in the menu which comes up, choose the partition(s) you want to back up, select where you will save your back up (local drive is what you should be going for if you have another hard drive), choose where the archive will be saved, and decide the time for the back up to start.
To use the back up file you made, click the restore option this time, and choose the archive you made earlier. Follow the steps and you will have your back up restored in a matter of minutes!
These, in my opinion, are the simplest ways to make a hard drive backup. The sole difference between these two methods are the fact that the first method uses the simple principle of copying and pasting files to another hard drive, while the second method creates an image file where your files are kept in (less chance than first method for your files to be infected in a case of a virus). Also, if you are planning to keep your whole Operating System intact and ready to use, I recommend to use the second method. The first method is only good to keep your important files.
I hope you all enjoyed the read and learnt how to make a hard drive backup successfully! I wouldn't want you to lose your important files by accident and I'm sure that you wouldn't either. Thanks for reading!
First things first, you will need another hard drive that you can store the backup on, since the whole point of making a hard drive backup is the fact that if your primary hard drive is unreachable, you can access your files via the second hard drive.
First way to do this is a fairly simple, and orthodox way. A copying script will do just fine if you aren't looking for anything fancy, and it works pretty well. All you need to do is to open a Notepad up and copy these lines:
cd X:\
xcopy X: Y:\backupbatch /s /e /t /h /D
Where X: is the hard drive you want to back up from (for ordinary users, usually C:), and Y is the destination hard drive where you will be forming your hard drive backup. Now save the notepad file as a .bat (your file name should be backupbatch according to this example), which will make this a batch file which you can run at will. Whenever you run the batch file, the computer will copy all the files you have from X to Y. You might say the process will take too long to do this every time, but I got good news for you! The /D switch enables the script to only copy the files which have been changed, so it won't copy everything all over if they are untouched. You can even automate this process with a software called Xecutor. What it does is, in simple words, running your script every time before you shut your computer down. You can also use the scheduling software of Windows to customize the timing closer to your liking. (I won't go into detail)
The second way of doing this would be to use a commercial software which are commonly used by most people who want to make a hard drive backup. I would suggest Paragon Backup & Recovery which you can find here, as it is the most complete of the backup programs I've used. The software comes with many features which makes life easy for you when you want to make a hard drive backup.
Using this software is pretty straight forward, all you need to do is to run the program, go to the Backup & Recovery menu, and click Smart Backup. After that, click Disk or Partitions in the menu which comes up, choose the partition(s) you want to back up, select where you will save your back up (local drive is what you should be going for if you have another hard drive), choose where the archive will be saved, and decide the time for the back up to start.
To use the back up file you made, click the restore option this time, and choose the archive you made earlier. Follow the steps and you will have your back up restored in a matter of minutes!
These, in my opinion, are the simplest ways to make a hard drive backup. The sole difference between these two methods are the fact that the first method uses the simple principle of copying and pasting files to another hard drive, while the second method creates an image file where your files are kept in (less chance than first method for your files to be infected in a case of a virus). Also, if you are planning to keep your whole Operating System intact and ready to use, I recommend to use the second method. The first method is only good to keep your important files.
I hope you all enjoyed the read and learnt how to make a hard drive backup successfully! I wouldn't want you to lose your important files by accident and I'm sure that you wouldn't either. Thanks for reading!
