By Marty Rocha

Tech & Business Editor, SNSPost

Welcome to my new weekly Friday posting,  Harmonious Computing.

As the owner of an IT Consulting firm that provides technical support to hundreds of computer users across the Chicago area, I seem to have amassed a large amount of technical know-how, tricks, shortcuts, and ways to make using your computer on a day-to-day basis easier and less repetitive.

For my premier post, I’m going to talk about one of the most boring yet important parts of having a digital life: Data Backup!

Many of us don’t think about it until it’s already happened: The inevitable hard-drive crash.  Come on! Backups are a pain!  They are slow!  It’s never a convenient time to run them!  I Left the backup drive at home! I just keep forgetting!  I Don’t Know HOW!!  But when it happens – you are sick to your stomach over your lost photos, music, documents and anything else that was important on the system!  You kick yourself in the ass for not being more diligent about it, and the whole thing is just a tragedy.

Let’s face it – A backup plan always falls apart when human interaction is part of it.  This is why an automatic backup is the only real way to ensure it gets done - all while you aren’t using your computer!  Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macintosh users have built-in backup software that, if configured correctly, will automatically do the following – Backup all Data on the system & Create a system image – a “Snapshot” – a very important component of getting yourself back to where you were before the crash.

A Snapshot is exactly what is sounds like – A “snapshot” of the system as it is, at that moment – Applications, Settings, Data, Hard Drive Layout – everything is taken and saved to an external hard drive (Do not use Flash Drives for this – the are too flakey and unreliable).  This allows you to restore the system to the exact way it was at the time of the last backup, before the crash, by simply booting off a Boot CD that was created during the configuration of the automatic backup or the OS Install DVD, and selecting the most recent backup to restore from on your external hard drive.  This process will have you back up and running in less than 3 hours, depending on the speed of your system.

Make sure you have an external USB, eSata or FireWire HardDrive, such as the LaCie d2 Quadra ($129).  Make sure it’s a minimum of 1 Terabyte – and if you have a lot of music and video’s – well you’ll want to consider 2-3 Terabytes.  If you want to be extra safe, Get an external drive with Dual Drives & Mirroring Capabilities (Raid 1), like the LaCie 2big Quadra ($369) – This allows one drive inside the unit to be mirrored to the other, offering further protection to your backups in case one of the backup drives fail.  This drive must always be on and plugged into your system.

In Windows 7 and Windows Vista, if you click the start button, then type Backup and Restore in the search box, it will be the first item to appear in the list above.  The first time you open it, you will be prompted through a wizard that sets you up with the most common settings.  This creates a full system backup and system image once a week to an external hard drive that it detects plugged in.  Once the settings are confirmed, it will reformat the drive with the proper settings to facilitate a backup, and hide it from view from My Computer – so you don’t accidently use it as a data drive.  It will then perform it’s first backup with the new settings in the background.  After you create the first backup, make sure you click on Create a system repair disc in the left hand column.  This is especially important if you don’t have the Windows Installation DVD (Which is often the case).  The first backup will always take the longest, as it has to back up the entire system – backups after this are significantly reduced in time.

On a Macintosh, you would use a program called Time-Machine.  Setting up Time Machine is as easy as connecting an external drive to your Mac.  The first time you connect an external drive, Time Machine asks if you would like to use it as a Backup Disk -  select “Use as Backup Disk” to confirm you want to use the drive for backups. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until your backup drive is full.  The first backup may take a while, so you might want to set up Time Machine in the evening so that the initial backup can be done overnight. Make sure not to interrupt the initial backup! You can continue to use your Mac while back up is running.  Once the initial backup is completed, subsequent hourly backups are created of only the files that have changed on your Mac since the last backup (as long as your Mac is awake and the backup drive is connected).

As you can see, with powerful backup software that is already included with your computer, you can have piece of mind that your data is protected, and if anything happens to your hard-drive you can recover – quickly and easily.  So do it people!!  Protect your data and don’t live in fear of losing all your data!

Next week I will discuss the next step in a comprehensive backup plan – online, cloud-based backups!