Backing Up your Windows Partition

Backing up your hard drive is vital for those of you who don't want your years of files/data lost. In my previous article I wrote about installing windows on a seperate partition and creating yet another partition for your applications and data. I will now tell you how to easily keep a backup of your second partition (applications + data).

1. Buy a 2nd hard drive and install it on your computer
2. using the XCOPY command to copy the files from your 2nd partition to your second hard drive. Example: XCOPY d:\ h:\ /s /y /c /d /r /i /h

D: your 2nd partition drive letter

H: your 2nd hard drive used for backup

/s copies all subdirectories

/y doesn't prompt for overwriting

/c keeps going during an error

/d copies changed files only

/r copies read only files

/i assumes destination must be a directory when it doesn't exist

/h hidden files are also copied

Note: The first time you run this command all files will be backed up and this may take some time depending on how many files there are. On subsequent backups because the the /d switch only the files that have changed will be backed up.

Remember that you computer can become curropted from many sources like viruses, your hard drive gets corrupted etc. Everyone should have a disaster recovery plan for their computers, and with hard drive prices so low you really have no excuse!