How to Save a Hard Drive

A hard drive is the main memory bank of a computer. If you lose it, your computer won't remember how to do anything, and you will lose all of your data. That's why saving a hard drive is important. Most people save years' worth of work on their hard drives and think nothing about securing or saving it until it's too late. Rather than spending hours, weeks or even months recovering from losing a hard drive, take some easy steps now to save it ahead of time.

Instructions

1. Back up your hard drive. This is the first step to saving the drive. You can use various programs that either reside on your computer or work online to back up your files. Norton's has a popular home version of back-up software, and Carbonite.com is a very popular online method. You can set up the perimeters for how often and what files you want to back up, and the back-up takes place at set intervals.

2. Copy your drive. If you don't want to wait for your drive to back up a piece at a time, or if you just need to do it once, then you can save your drive by either copying all of the data and pasting it onto a new drive, or you can capture an image of the drive to save everything, including the operating system, exactly as it is. Ghost is one powerful program that lets you save images of your hard drive.

3. Recover your hard drive. If you need to save your hard drive after you have had a crash or a problem, it can still be done, with varying results. If you have had a serious problem such as a fire or had your hard drives submerged in water, you can send it away to be recovered by experts for thousands of dollars. If you are just having some problems with the drive becoming unstable, sometimes freezing it can provide stability for long enough to copy your files. If you have simply had files deleted that you want to recover, many software programs exist that will help you recover your files. PC Inspector is a popular tool for recovering files on a hard drive.