ellisfaith said:
Question
I just puchased Vista Home and should I ( and how ) back up my whole
comuter
before installing it? Im a newbee and I won't tell you the color of my
hair
LOL but I am pretty good with my computer although I have never backed it
up.
If I do what do I back it up onto? a CD or one of those little devices
that
hold a lot of info??
Thank you all for your help, I have a bunch of pictures on here and info
that I would hate to lose, oh yea if I uninstall my Office 2003 and
reinstall
it as I have been reading here, will I lose all my address's and saved
email?
You're way ahead of the curve by thinking about it and having the sense to
ask. I think it is essential, before doing an OS upgrade, to make an image
of the system with a drive imaging program. I currently use Acronis True
Image Home, Version 10, which works in both XP and Vista. This can create a
compressed image of drives which can be stored on external media, such as an
external hard drive in a drive enclosure, connected to the computer via USB,
Firewire or eSata.
To begin with you should always have a full and complete backup of important
data. I use drive imaging for this purpose. Images can be made on a drive
or partition basis; ATI also does file backups and drive cloning. Images
can be full, incremental or differential so subsequent images are much
smaller and it takes much less time to make them. Restores can be done on a
file, partition or image basis.
With the system imaged you can then restore the image if something goes
wrong with the Vista installation.
You can purchase a preassembled external USB hard drive but it is much less
costly (and simple)to put one together. Buy an EIDE hard drive as a white
box version (meaning it doesn't come in the fancy retail box and doesn't
have any utility disks with it (which if needed can be obtained from the
drive manufacturer's web site as a free download), and buy an external hard
drive enclosure. Insert the drive in the enclosure, attach the ribbon cable
and power connector, put the lid back on, attach it via USB cable to the
computer and you're good to go.
You can get a 320 GB Western Digital EIDE Caviar white box hard drive from
Newegg.com for under $90. Enclosures are in the $20 range. There are many
manufacturers of them, Kingwin is one. The cost of Acronis True Image can
vary on a day to day basis on Newegg.com. I saw it go between $29.99 and
$39.99 in various increments on a daily basis. Luckily I caught it at the
low end, but purchase at your favorite software retailer. You will get a
better price than buying direct from Acronis.
And the best thing is after Vista is installed, you can use ATI in Vista to
routinely image the system to the external drive. This is an excellent
backup and recovery solution.