By Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
Copyrighted June 2009

(Ed. Note - In preparation for Gene Barlow's webinar at the August 12th General meeting, this article is reproduced with his permission.)

Backing up your computer’s hard drive on a regular basis is the most important thing every user should be doing on their computer. The hard drive on your computer will eventually crash and when it does, you will be protected if you have a good backup. Without a backup, your computer will no longer function and all of your important files and pictures will be lost. Start doing backups today and be safe!

The best way to backup your computer is to use Acronis True Image Home 2009 and save your backups on an external hard drive. You should backup your main hard drive at least once a week including the entire hard drive and not just a few files or folders on the drive. I recommend a full backup image at the beginning of each month and then weekly incremental backup images during the month.

See my article titled the Perfect Backup Approach at http://www.ugr.com/nl0804.html for more details on the best way to do your backups. You can order the latest version of Acronis True Image Home 2009 from us at http://www.ugr.com/TrueImage.html. Use the order code of UGNL0609 when completing the order to get an excellent discount price.

Many users start with a great determination to do their backups on a regular basis, but after a couple of weeks of doing backups they tend to forget to do regular backups. I have found that it is best to automate your backups, so that you don’t need to remember to do this very important task. Let the computer remember to do its own backups when they need to be done. That way, your backups will get done on the weekly basis, so that you are properly protected. The purpose of this paper is to help you set up automatic backups on your computer.

Acronis completely redesigned the end-user interface to True Image 2009 to make the product easier to use. The automatic backup function was also completely revamped. This new automatic backup function was not ready to release when the rest of the product was released in October 2008. It took Acronis a couple of extra months to complete and perfect this important function and it was then put in the product with follow-on builds of the software.

Before you start to set up an automatic backup on your True Image 2009, you need to update your True Image 2009 software to install the latest build (#9709) which became available on January 23, 2009. To do this, you must do three things: 1) set up an account on the Acronis web site, 2) register your product serial number in this account, and 3) download and install the build from the entry on your registered product. Details on how to do this can be found on my web site at http://www.ugr.com/AcronisQuestions.html. The rest of this paper assumes that you have upgraded your system to this latest build in order to work properly.

Before we begin the detailed steps to set up your automatic backup, let me suggest a calendar change that needs to be considered. I recommend a full backup at the beginning of each month and then weekly incremental backup images at the end of each week during the month. The problem in doing this is that every month has a different number of days and begins on a different day of the week. So, setting up a rule to do exactly this schedule is not possible. A better approach is to adopt the 13-month calendar of exactly 4 weeks that many businesses use. That would give you exactly a full backup followed by 3 weekly incremental backups 13 times each year. This approach is more regular than trying to fit a regular backup schedule into our irregular monthly calendar. So, in this paper, I will be showing how to set up a 13-month approach.

First, create a folder on your external hard drive to contain your backups. Name this folder after the computer and partition that you plan to backup in this folder. If you have one computer and one main partition on it, this folder may simply be named something like My Backups. If you have two computers to backup on the same external hard drive, set up two folders and name them after each computer. For example, name them My Backups HP Computer and My Backups Dell Computer. Now we are ready to start setting up the automatic backup process with True Image 2009.