Every Person’s Computer Essentials by Dmitriy Zasyatkin

Just about everyone owns some sort of computer. Here is my list of the essentials to keep your computer running at its best.

Battery Backup

A battery backup is an absolute must for everyone because a power outage may actually corrupt your hard drive in addition to loosing that unsaved work. I highly recommend getting a battery backup that can last for several hours while the computer is on. Like this APC one  from Amazon for less than $200, which can handle all your network gear too. Its great to have all your printers and network equipment plugged into a battery backup too because they can loose their configurations if they are power cycled on and off a few times.

Data Backup: Online and Local

Hard Drives crash all the time. If it hasn’t happened to you yet then it probably will soon. Sorry to scare you but its true. Sometimes you can actually hear the hard drive making noises before it dies.

Its best to have both a local and online backup because the online backup is really necessary in case something happens to your local backup, but the online backup can take a long time to download so you don’t want to have to rely on the online backup in case you need all your big files immediately after the crash.

For a local backup, I, Dmitriy Zasyatkin, recommend using the free version SyncBack to backup to an external or secondary drive nightly. (Mac users have Time-Machine, so they already know the best local backup for them.) Just make sure to backup everything in C:\Users\[Your User Name] or C:\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name] folder. Don’t really worry about backing up the other folders, like “Windows” since you will need to re-install all the programs (or do an “image restore”).

For an online backup, I recommend I-Drive because its only $50 a year for up to 150GB or $150 per year for up to 500GB, it backs up open and locked files (like Outlook files), can use Network Drives and it works on all computers, including Windows Server. (Mozy is another good alternative, which lots of people swear by but they make you pay a lot for their “business plan” to use Mozy on a server.)

Disk Imaging

It probably took you a while to get that perfect system state of your computer and it would also take a while to re-install the OS and all the programs with all your settings if your computer crashed. This is where Disk Imaging can save us lots of time because it can make an exact copy of your whole system onto an external/secondary hard drive so that if your main hard drive crashed tomorrow you can just easily restore it right back to the way it was before it crashed from the disk image backup.

Disk Image Backups are pretty intensive so its not something you want to have happen every night because your hard drives might wear out so a good compromise is to do a disk image backup just once a week over a weekend night.

If you have Windows 7 or Vista, Business or Ultimate edition, then you already have the built-in disk imaging backup software, in the form of the “Backup and Restore Center”. But the best free disk imaging software is Macrium Reflect because it works well even for people who have multiple partitions and because its super easy to use.  Most people think that Windows automatically makes disk image backups, but unfortunately it doesn’t and even its “restore points” functionality has other problems, besides being on the same hard disk, so in the event of a hard drive crash the restore points are worthless. So if you don’t already have a disk image backup of your computer then I highly recommend doing one this weekend, because it will only take about 15 minutes to setup and it can save you tens of hours of time and headaches.

Enjoy!

by Dmitriy Zasyatkin