BACKUP AND DISK IMAGING

Disk imaging software lets you store a complete copy of your hard drive, so you can quickly get up and running even if you need to completely replace the hardware. Most imaging tools also let you back up and extract files from an image, for all-round protection. If that sounds useful, look for the bonus software edition of next month’s

PC Pro, which includes the complete O&O DiskImage Professional suite.

Here, we’ll use the software to back selected files to a NAS on our local network. Start by opening the Tools menu and clicking Map Network Drive, which opens Windows’ standard drive mapping tool. We’ll leave the assigned letter at Z, then click Browse… and navigate to a folder on the drive. Clicking Finish maps it, and our selected folder will behave like a locally connected drive.

We can create an image of our whole hard drive – but we’re running this local backup in addition to a cloud backup service, which is storing our files off-site. So we just want to back up our Documents and Pictures, so we can recover them quickly without having to wait for a download from the server. Switch to the File operation tab and check the boxes beside the folders.

We could back them up now by clicking “Start file backup” to create a one-time archive. But, as these files are frequently accessed, we want to make sure they’re backed up regularly. Click “Add as job” instead and give the job a logical name. Switching to the “Start time” tab, we’re scheduling it to run at the end of each working day. On the Notification tab, we’ve asked it to send us an email each time it completes.

Finally, we need to tell it where to store the backup, so switch to the File backup tab, click the “…” beside Storage path and navigate to the Z: drive (our NAS). We’ve created a folder inside it called backup, which we’ll use to store the archive. Clicking Apply creates the job and pulls up a summary of what DiskImage Professional will do. By default it makes an unencrypted backup using BZIP2 compression.

You can also image your drive at regular intervals. Click “One-click imaging” on the Drive operation tab, followed by the “…” beside Target, and set the destination folder. Clicking Start performs the operation.