This week I had to answer that question for one of my customers. He had his laptop stolen and came into the shop to buy a new one. Luckily he had purchased a backup system from CMS Peripherals that is called an Automatic Backup System. He had owned a laptop computer and the system was a hard drive with a PCMCIA card that allowed you to connect the drive to your laptop and backup your system. They also make USB versions of the drives to allow the use of their systems on desktop computers. The 20 GB USB drive sells for $399 and the PCMCIA version is $499. The software that was installed on his old computer would start up every time that he booted his computer and let him know when it had been 7 days since his last backup. He then would put the card into the PCMCIA slot and perform a full backup of his system. 

We would have been doing fine at this point except for the fact that the software that came with the backup system did a great job of backing up the data, but was lacking in the recovery portion of the process. The customer had brought me the external hard drive to have his information put on the new laptop, but had neglected to bring any software that came with it. While he was driving home to get the software and manual I went to the Website of the company that made the product, and began to search the support area for a download or information about recovering his data. I ended up calling the company when he returned with the manual and I read the recovery process. They explained how to drag and drop the folders that you wanted to recover into what ever folder you wanted to save them to on the new drive. In other words, there was no way to recover the data until you had Windows installed on the new drive. He wanted to be able to turn the new laptop on and have all of his programs and data intact, just like they were running on the old laptop. Unfortunately this was not going to happen with the software that came with the drive. CMS Products has since changed the software to include a recovery process, but only for the PCMCIA version of the drives. The USB versions would still require that Windows be installed and then you would be able to copy your data. This is fine as long as you realize this fact before you have to recover from a loss of your system.

Since the customer wanted to turn on the new laptop and not have to reinstall all of his software, I had to find another way to recover the data and copy it onto the new drive without opening the box that the PCMCIA hard drive was enclosed in. Opening the case for the external drive would have voided the warranty and we wanted to avoid this if we could. My service manager came up with an ingenious idea that did the trick. He used Partition Magic to split the drive on the new laptop into two drives. This left the software that was installed with the laptop intact, and gave us another drive to copy to. He then made a copy of the old drive onto the second partition. Now we had a copy of the old drive on the new drive and were able to Ghost the second partition to the first partition. After removing the drivers from the old laptop and loading the drivers for the new laptop, the customer was on his way with a new laptop that had all of his data and programs on it just like the old laptop. 

It would have been a lot easier with the correct software to start with but we will live and learn from the experience. The customer is purchasing the new software and will be ready in case this happens again. The backup system worked but you always have to test the recovery process before you need to use it to be sure that it will do what you think it will. He was under the impression that a device that was called an Automatic Backup System also had some way to recover or restore the drive if needed. He was mistaken but we were able to make his wishes a reality in spite of the drawbacks of the software.

This is one idea that you could use instead of a tape drive or CDR to run regular backups on your system. I think that with the cost of hard drives falling so rapidly, this is one of the most cost efficient ways to protect yourself. There are a number of specialty devices that are available on the market like the one we discussed. If you are not worried about having to reinstall programs, then one of the USB hard drives might be an option for you if you own a laptop or a desktop. If you own a desktop, you can have the same amount of protection by adding an additional hard drive to your system. There is a program that you can download from the Western Digital Web site that will allow you to copy your old drive to the new drive so that you could use the larger, newer drive as the main drive on your system. You could then use the old drive as an extra storage area to backup your system or documents and data that you would not want to lose. Most of the systems that were built in the past few years were coming with hard drives with 6 to 8 GB of space. The systems that are being built now are coming with 20 GB or larger drives to start with. You can buy a 20 GB drive for about $100 and if you have the computer knowledge, you can install the drive as your main drive and use your old drive to hold your backups.

With the extra drive, you could use software that would make an exact copy of your drive for you. Drive copy, Partition Magic, and Ghost are programs that will make exact copies of your drive onto another drive. Drive Copy will allow you to copy one drive to the other and then will hide the second drive so that it will not be visible in Windows. You would need to remember to run the program on a regular basis so that you would have a current copy, but it would be an exact copy. You would only need to change the cables and jumpers on the drive and make the drive active in order to begin using it. Ghost and Partition Magic have the same capabilities when it comes to copying drives. Ghost will also allow you to create an image of your drive. You can then restore the image to a new drive if the need arises. You can the use the rest of the drive space for other storage needs that you might have. Partition Magic also allows you to adjust the size of the partitions on your drive to allow for the installation of multiple operating systems or other storage needs that you might have. 

Drive Copy will cost you about $50 and can be purchased online from PowerQuest . Partition Magic is about $70 and is available from the same company. Ghost is available from Symantec  for about $70.  All of the programs will allow you to make copies of your drive for safekeeping. As with any type of computer work that you do, you need to know your limitations. You can lose all of your data if you answer one question wrong. I like to tell the story about a former tech that I had. He had been working hard to finish a batch of about 20 workstations. He had them all built and was booting each of the systems into Windows for the final cleanup before we boxed them up. The third machine seemed to have a problem booting to Windows and I stopped to see what the problem was. Somehow he had sent the copy the wrong way on one of the drives and copied an empty drive to the good drive. When we tried to start the machines with the empty drives, they obviously would not go into Windows since there was nothing on the drive. It was a problem that was easy for us to fix since we still had multiple copies of the drive ready to go. If you made the same mistake with the only copy of your data, you would have a very big problem on your hands. 

This type of solution will not be for everyone but it could appeal to some of the users in the group. If the idea sounds like something that you would like to try, be sure that you know what you are doing before you open your system and try to install a new drive. Follow all of the safety precautions that we have discussed in previous columns and read the directions for the software choices that you make. This is not the type of software that you can guess and hope at the answers. A wrong answer could give you the same result as the thief or a dead hard drive can. Used correctly, these type of software programs can be an invaluable tool.