How do I create a backup disk of my computer's hard drive?

Question

Recently I had problems with my computer and almost lost all my information. But luckily I was able to fix my computer from the disk that came with it. Is it possible to create a backup cd with my computer's files on it?

Answer 1

To create a backup of your entire hard drive would be excessive for the average computer user. With computers having a bare bones setup of about 40GB, you would need burn about 100 CD's, and you would need 17,920 4MB flash drives. Data transfer rates are slow with these forms of storage so to copy that much data would take hours. Usually, I simply suggest backing up only your important documents.

You could buy a second hard drive and set up a RAID controller that continually backs up your data so that if one drive fails, you have another drive that is good.

Answer 2

Look into boot CDs that have imaging software.

Acronis - commercial product, but used to have a 30 day trial. There are  images of their boot CD floating around on the internet...(illegal of course). You can backup to a image file over the network or to an external USB disk

DiskWizard - If your drives are Seagate (or at least ne drive), thay have an OEM version of Acronis to copy disks

Clonezilla - Free Linux disk cloning tool

There are many other, commercial backup productsa out there. I use Acronis for system backup and weekly image update files.