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.
