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dentalLab June, 2006
by Ron Williams
dentalLab web site
IT Update
Acronis BackupThat your computer will one day fail is as inevitable as death and taxes. I have had a hard drive die (that's the filing cabinet containing all your data) and I have had an entire computer curl up its toes. In that case you may be lucky and be able to unplug the hard drive and pop it into a new computer, but Sod's Law says that, like mine, it will not be readable and everything will be lost. Think what that could mean, not only to your business but all your letters and emails at home. You can copy files from your computer to a CD or a DVD though that is endlessly tedious, add a second hard drive to your computer or plug in an external drive. PCs almost always come with cables ready to add a second internal hard drive and if you read the instructions it's a simple task and capacity, speed and prices are for ever improving Misco.co.uk for example offer external drives of 200 and 300 Gigabytes for around £100 complete with case — make sure it has a fan though, they get hot — and internal drives are even cheaper. An external drive simply plugs into your USB socket and Windows XP will sort it out automatically. You can copy files across ("Documents and Settings" usually contains most of your important bits) using Windows Explorer or try a specialised backup programms. There is one within Windows but I don't know anyone who has been able to sort it out. I have been using Acronis True Image for six months and it works. You can choose whether to back up everything on the computer or specific files and the next time around add files that have changed, or start again from scratch. If you copy programmes using Windows Explorer, you cannot copy them back — only data can be copied that way, you need a specialist programme to sort out all those Windows idiosyncrasies. I create a full backup each week and incremental ones every night onto an external drive and Acronis compresses the file so I can fit several full backups onto the drive. How do I know it works? Because my computer has just suffered a severe trauma, it is only then you find whether the backup works. Two years ago with another programme it didn't and I lost most of my data. You can find it at Software.co.uk for £29.49 delivered, so it's not dear and you can try it out for free first.
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