4. SOFTWARE
Before You Backup!
With more of your work and personal life becoming digitized, backups are essential. Backups protect and preserve precious data, music files, digital photos, digital videos and other important computer documents from being lost forever.
The following next few steps are recommendations to consider before backing up, to help the process run smoothly:
1.Ensure there are no file system errors by running Windows Check Disk (or a similar check disk utility) on your computer’s internal hard disk drive.
2.Defragment your computer’s internal hard disk drive by using Windows Disk Defragmenter (or a similar disk defragmenter utility).
3.Make copies of any important files or data to another drive.
4.Hard drive backups work best when done on a regular basis. Take a moment to establish a backup plan that works for you.
Disk Clone and Disk Image will both create a full backup of your system.
Use Disk Image and create a full backup each day, week or month depending on how critical your data is and how far back you would like to recover a version of the files you are working with.
Use Disk Clone and create a full backup if you are upgrading to a larger hard drive or anytime you want or need to have an exact bootable clone of your hard drive.
5.Once you have decided upon your plan, proceed to the appropriate sections in this manual to either use Disk Clone or Disk Image.
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