How To BackUp Your Hard Drive

Posted on 03. Feb, 2009 by Kyle Judkins in How To, Software

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hard drive picIf you have ever had a hard drive fail on you, you know that terrible feeling that comes over you when you realize what just happened.  You lost all your music, movies, party pictures family pictures and all kinds of work documents.  It’s happened to me, and I think I even cried a little about it (..so).

Well, one year later I am back to having the same music, movies and games on my computer, but this time I am using Cobain Backup to make sure if I have a hard drive fail that I won’t lose all my data.  Let’s learn how easy it is to back up your computer.

Creating a Task

After installation, open up Cobain Backup and you should see the following window.

cobain ss1

In order to back up your files or folders, you will need to create a task.  Click on the Task button then select New Task.  The following window will pop up.

cobain task window

You will need to name your task.  I decided to name mine Pictures, because I want to make sure I never lose any of my great photos.  Next, choose the options you want in your backup.

Backup Types

Cobain Backup offers four different types of backup: Full, Incremental, Differential and Dummy.

  • Full – This will backup all of the files your select.
  • Incremental – This will backup only that files that have changed since your last backup.
  • Differential – This will only backup the files that have changed since the last Full backup.
  • Dummy – This is used to just schedule events and not perform a backup.

For this example, I am going to do a Full backup of the folder that contains all of my pictures.

Add Files and Folders

The next thing you should do is select the files or folders you want to backup and the place you want to back them up to.  I have selected the My Pictures folder and chosen to back it up on my external hard drive.

cobain add files

Schedule

Cobain Backup can run on startup if you want it to.  This feature allows you to schedule backups for certain times.  If you don’t like scheduling this task, you can always just manually start the process whenever you feel like it.  For this example, I decided to schedule the backup for once a month at 1:00 AM on the first day of the month.

cobain schedule

Archive

You may be backing up very large files, so you might want to compress them or even encrypt them if they are super important.  Cobain Backup gives you both of these options.  I decided to use 7-zip compression and to not use any encryption, but you can make that decision on your own.

cobain archieve

Other Options

There are a few other advanced options that allow you to account for special items or events.  You could also pick certain user accounts to use, but these options aren’t needed to perform a basic backup.

Run Your Task

Once you’ve selected all you options and pressed OK, you will see the following window.

cobain finished task

This gives you a summary of your task.  Also, if you right click on the task, you can manually run the task if you so choose.  Otherwise, your backup will run when you scheduled it.

Conclusion

Cobain Backup is a super simple program that allows for quick and easy backup.  You have no excuse to not be backing up your computer now.

Photo by WilliamHook

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1 Other Comment

One Response to “How To BackUp Your Hard Drive”

  1. jojobloblo

    03. Feb, 2009

    Or just put your hard drives in a RAID.

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