It’s happened to us all – we’ve been working away on a project and then a sudden computer crash erases all record of our effort.In more serious cases, a hard drive crash could mean that you lose access to everything you’ve ever saved.It is because of this it can be a good idea to back up your entire hard drive.  There are specialist online data backup companies but you can also back up your data manually.

You should start off by deciding where you will be backing up the computer data to.Ideally you should use an external hard drive that has enough disk space to store copies of everything that is on your current hard drive.In order to find out how large your external device needs to be, on your windows PC click the right mouse button on the hard drive in ‘My Computer’ then select the ‘Properties’ item in the menu.This will tell you the size of the current hard drive. 

Once you have purchased a suitably sized external hard drive, you should purchase some suitable data backup software.  You have several options, however Norton Ghost is perfectly suited to the task.

Next, plug in the USB drive and by following the manufacturers instructions you should load up the backup software.Once it has loaded, you should then create and run the backup.  This can take some time, depending on the size of the hard drive being copied so be prepared to wait a while.  Once all the data has been copies, check the files and folders on your USB drive to make sure that all the essential files have been copies and that you haven’t overlooked anything.

If this seems like a complicated process then do bear in mind there are lots of online data backup companies that you can make the process much easier for you.