How to Back Up a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m James Adams and I’m here for expertvillage.com and we’re going to talk about backing up your hard drive with Norton Ghost and Norton Ghost is a program you can buy for about $60 on the internet and it’s worth it. So now we’re going to talk about backing up hard drives and for this demonstration we’re going to use a program called Norton Ghost 9. It’s the best program you can get to do this sort of thing and we’re going to do a simple kind of back up. You can restore files or folders, which mean you can backup individual files or folders. In this case, we’re going to do an entire backup, we’re going to take the entire C-drive with Windows XP is reciting it and we’re going to back it up. In case I get a virus or something in the future, I can always take that backup that I did in the past and restore it back. Basically, you’re taking a picture of a point in time when the computer worked fine and in the future if it stops working you can always take that picture and restore it back and it’ll be fine again. So select backup drives, this popup will come up, you click next. Notice my computer has two hard drives; I got two 80 gig hard drives. Since we’re backing up the C windows hard drive, we select the C Windows hard drive. Click that and you have three options to do a backup. You can back it up to a local file, but it’s important to know that if I’m backing up the C drive I cannot save this file on the C drive. It needs to be saved to another hard drive. In my case I have a C and a D. If I’m backing up C I need to back it up to D, or if I’m backing up D I need to save it to C. Network file, that means if you have a network of computers you can back it up to a computer network or CDRW DVD. In this case, we select local file because I’m going to back it up to another hard drive. Notice there’s my C drive. Here’s my D drive, select documents, click OK, click next. My case is going to say I don’t have enough space on the D drive, but that’s okay because I already made a backup a while ago and I’m okay so let’s pretend. When you do this if you have enough space on the destination drive this will not appear and if it appears, it means you need to erase some stuff from the hard drive to make room for the backup. So would you like to continue, yes, and then you just click next and then you click next one more time and there you go. Now it’s backing up your hard drive. In my case I’m going to click cancel since I’ve already made a backup and this is backing up hard drives. This takes a while so this can take like up to 30 minutes just be aware of that."