Q: In reference to backing up my hard drive, I’ve heard a little bit about drive imaging. What’s the difference between this and just regularly backing up my files?

A: Protecting our data isn’t just a random thing that we should occasionally think about - it’s a necessary step. Even if you hardly use certain files, you can almost count on missing them after they’re gone. It always seems like you’ll need those files once it’s too late.

Backing up all of your documents by hand is a good preventative measure to take, but if you really want to preserve the contents of your entire hard drive, drive imaging is the way to go. With the imaging software, you can back up an exact image of your drive. Thanks to compression, you can fit this image on a storage medium for retrieval later on down the road. If your drive winds up going kaput, you can either restore the entire contents of the drive from the image, or just transfer selected files.

A couple of software solutions that will do this for you are Paragon’s Drive Backup and Symantec’s Norton Ghost.

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