Windows Vista and its predecessors haven’t really been famous for their ability to create backups. Third party applications were and are therefore a must have, if you’d like to sleep tight without worrying about your files. Playing around with a harddisk partitioning tool – and not reading properly – I managed to delete all my files on my harddisk a while ago. Afterwards, a restauration programme confirmed that I did my job well. Luckily, I got myself Acronis True Image 2009 before this incident and stored everything important on my external drive. While it isn’t a cheap product, I found it worth the investment to secure my files automatically.
With Windows 7, Microsoft offers probably the most powerful backup solution yet, without the need to purchase extra sofware. If you’re using Windows 7 already, you might want to read the how-to from mysticgeek.
) A few years ago Linux-distributions might still have been geek-only-territory, but these times are long gone. My parents are using Ubuntu on my old laptop and they can go online, create documents, burn their pictures and so on, without me having them to tell how it’s done. For the ‘I can’t use my Windows software’-argument, I will publish a post soon, which should clarify the mystery of using Windows software – if you really need it. The hardware issue, well…, I never really encountered big issues myself, but you might have a point there. Overall I would say, you should try and decide for yourself and not listening to others, who might never have done so and actually never spent time with Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.
Anyway. Understanding that synced files which are also saved online (good if your computer suddenly doesn’t start anymore for example) are a nice thing, let me show you how it works.
