I have two hard drives in my main machine. One is the "working" disk drive, the other is simply for backups of all the important stuff.

Earlier on today, my "working" drive gave up the ghost - a high pitched squeal, followed by nothing. And, of course, I had not made a backup for ages. I got that awfulk sinking feeling in my gut. Oh SH1T.

I am not at all good with computer hardware. I know my way around most pieces of software, but struggle to even put new RAM into a machine - so I knew that this was going to be the disaster to end all disasters.

I switched on my laptop to try to find some easy solutions online, and found some advice saying to give the hard drive a gentle knock in order to try to get it going. I suppose it's like you see in the movies when people have a heart attack…

Anyway, that worked! YES! OK, so next thing is to get the disk fully backed up - for this I googled and found a product called "Migrate Easy" from Acronis. I managed to image my working drive onto the backup very easily using this.

I then remembered that I have two 160gb Hard Drives, unused - I had bought them with the intention to upgrade, but had never gotten around to it…so that's what I did, and it was simple(ish)!

Step 1: Remove the Backup drive and insert one of the 160gb drives. Make it usable by running "Migrate Easy". I'm guessing that this formats the disk, and allocates a partition. This is my new backup drive.

Step 2: Image the working drive onto the new backup drive, again using "Migrate Easy". This took about 20 minutes.

Step 3: Take out the working drive, and replace it with the 160gb backup drive. Making sure to adjust the jumpers appropriately.

I now have a machine that has 1 drive - a working drive, that is 160gb.

Step 4: Make sure it works. Well, it didn't - I had to go into the BIOS and reset some stuff. Then it booted OK.

Step 5: Add the other 160gb drive as a backup drive. This didn't want to work at all, so I reckon that the drive is dead. I'll try it tomorrow in one of my other machines. Instead, I added the original backup drive back into the computer.

And it all works!

So, I now have a computer which, thankfully, works as it should do.

I highly suggest that anyone who makes a living from their computer makes sure that they backup on a very regular schedule, at the very least a weekly backup, and better would be a daily backup I reckon.

What I am going to do is image my drive before I go to bed each night. That way, if my Hard Drive is DOA in the morning, I have a full up-to-date image ready to be restored. Or of course, if it's a sunday and I cannot get to the shop to buy a new HD, I can simply boot from the backup drive! Then when I get the new HD, put the backup image onto it and set it as the master.

Easy Backups

Acronis Easy Migrate is available on a 15 day free of trial, after which I think it costs about $40. I'm looking at the other product in the range, which is probably more suitable for my needs. Have a look for yourself at True Image.

If anyone has other options for imaging software that can be set up to schedule at a certain time each evening, I'd be very pleased if you would comment to let me know!

Cheers.