Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

I have had a lot of views and follow up questions to some videos I have had on hard drive data recovery. On the one hand I’m thrilled that so many people find this information valuable to them; on the other hand I’m sad to see that so many people are in need of recovering data off of failed drives.

Computer backup is not difficult, expensive or even very time consuming anymore.

You can schedule Acronis True Image to automatically backup to an external USB hard drive on a regular basis. (I recommend a 7200rpm hard drive and a warranty longer than 1 year.)

Please don’t think your hard drive will last forever; even if it’s brand new it can fail at any time.

Last week I tackled some brutal Chicagoland traffic and attended an Acronis Certified Engineer training course. The course was well done and with a small class size was very worthwhile. As a bonus I took a knowledge test of the Acronis True Image software.

I passed.

It’s always encouraging to meet with other people in the same line of work that have experienced positive results using the same tools that I have chosen to use. One of the others in attendance has been using the product about as long as I have, dating back to version 7 (several years ago).

The new Acronis True Image Echo is quite a product, and there is even an SBS (Microsoft Small Business Server) version out now.

You can read more here.

Acronis True Image Home is now in version 11. This venerated computer backup software was great in version 10, but they have bested that with the new version 11.

I have written often about how this easy to use, inexpensive software is a must have for anyone with data they hold dear.

Acronis makes it easy to backup your data and more importantly, easy to restore your data when necessary.

I simply love the ability to “mount” a backup image and explore it just like another drive on my computer. Makes individual file restore a cinch. I’ve even use this method to grab drivers for a video card or other device from an old C:\Windows\System32 directory from an out of data backup.

If you have an older version, I suggest upgrading to the new version 11 of Acronis True Image Home.

If you have never tried it I suggest the Free Trial Download of Acronis True Image Home 11.

Or heck, take my recommendation and Buy It Now!.

The important thing is this: PROTECT YOUR DATA!

Acronis True image makes it easy, fast, and inexpensive to be fully protected.

Here is a Video on YouTube showing me using Acronis True Image (workstation).

I had a Pentium 4 2.4 processor floating around that would only eBay for about $25. So I decided to see how little I could spend to turn it into a decent computer.

I found the Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard was feature packed and very inexpensive. 1 GB of memory from Crucial.com was less than $75. The SATA hard drive I had laying around had XP installed on it from an Asus P5B or P5L installation, not sure which, but surprised the heck out of me when it booted into windows with just a few drivers missing.

Since more and more of the problems I solve are regarding Windows Vista, I decided to see how Vista would fare on this board.

So I downloaded and ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor. After doing its thing, the advisor reported that it had encountered an error (thanks for all of that detail, Microsoft); and perhaps I should re-download the latest version (did it change in 15 minutes?) and try again.

Forget it. Install Vista anyway.

I booted with the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (Dell OEM copy) and chose to install to a new partition. Wisely, I had only allocated about half of the 120GB disk to the Windows XP Pro installation.

With Vista, there really aren’t too many questions to answer during the install so I came back later to see how it was doing. I had to press the power button since it had gone to sleep waiting for me (fitting, as I have fallen asleep so many times waiting for Windows) but essentially it was all done.

The Asus P4V8X-MX board did not come with Vista drivers and I didn’t download any. Yet everything worked; no yellow exclamations in device manager; NIC, sound, and an old Asus GeForce MX 400 AGP video card all worked perfectly. The P4V8X-MX has video on the board making it a great value, but I figured AGP video with its own RAM would perform better - and the card was just gathering dust anyway.

So I guess my advice when Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor reports an error is to just go ahead anyway.

With one BIG caveat!:

I had backed up the PC first, even though I didn’t care about the XP install, with Acronis True Image software to a USB hard drive.

When I was done I now had a dual boot, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, computer. Runs great on both.

Absolutely; sort of. If you own a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.

What you get is a basic version of Acronis True Image Home with just the basic features.

But you CAN do a full image backup and restore. Not only that, it surprised the heck out of me to find out that you can mount an image as a drive letter, explore with Windows Explorer, and copy files from that image if you want to.

Acronis True Image Software and a USB hard drive is an awesome combination.

Here are the details and the links:

For Seagate Hard drives click here.

For Maxtor Hard drives click here.

When you decide you love the program so much you want the full version, please come back here to buy through a link on my website. Thanks.

I was at my Chiro today and he asked me about backing up data on his business computer. It’s not like I haven’t tried to talk him into Acronis True Image and a USB hard drive before; it’s just that he is, well, rather frugal. Ok, cheap.

The reason he brought up computer backup today, though, was because of friend of his is currently trying to recover from a computer disaster without benefit of a good backup of his data, programs, or anything else of value.

PLEASE, don’t wait for disaster to strike you before thinking seriously about computer backup. Grab a USB flash drive of some type then drag and drop some files to it - then take it home; or take it to the office if it’s your home data. Encrypt it first for security.

Just please take action now, while your data is still accessible. It’s a lot more fun to recover data from a quality backup than from a toasted hard drive.

You can find more info on computer backup here.

Data backup on my mind again.

Here I am at a yard sale, typing on my laptop, connected to a wireless router (wirelessly) which is connected to the internet with Motorola Canopy wireless gear and an antenna on the roof of my truck. (I’m a director at the local telco and I’m trying to promote our wireless internet service.)

Things are a touch slow right now, so I thought I’d comment on the movie “Duplex” we watched last night.

Ben Stiller is working on his laptop trying to complete his book with the deadline looming. Naturally, something happens to the laptop just after he finishes the novel. He’s been working on this project for months and has not even one backup.

Wait, you’re saying, it’s just a movie. People in real life don’t do stuff that stupid. Well, you’d be wrong my friend. I’ve mentioned before the bright, ambitious college student whose hard drive crashed with her semester thesis on it - nary a backup to be found.

Thumb drives are just too cheap, too convenient, not to have multiple copies of important data.

For better data backup, check out Acronis True Image. Does a great job of picking up just important stuff if that’s all you want; does an even better job at imaging the entire drive to an external hard drive - also incredibly cheap.