Here’s how to prevent a misfortune in advance, by creating and image of your hard drive and setting up a data backup.

This article contains steps to image your hard drive and set up a backup.

Creating a Drive Image

Creating a drive image can help you restore your PC to an almost new state with minor configuration changes, if things go haywire with your system or an unlucky event takes place. You will need to create an image for your hard drive only once; there is no need to repeatedly create a new image every time you make changes to your hard drive. The image automatically updates itself to the current state of your hard drive. It might even be possible that you won’t need the drive’s image but still, it might come in handy.

One of the best freeware programs out there that can replicate and return your hard drive to its previous state is, Macrium Reflect Free. It is loads better than many of the commercial cloning programs sold. In fact, PCWorld’s Jon Jacobi appreciated this software and said, “its interface is the friendliest I’ve run across.”

What is the best place to store your cloned hard drive data? Macrium Reflect Free offers you great options like DVDs, external drives, and even network drives. Each option has its pros and cons (Personally, I would advise buying an inexpensive external hard drive to use for this, it can even help you for other backup purposes.)

Gear Up for Backups

Make a backup now or you’ll regret it later on. A free tool called OffiSync can easily sync your local documents with your Google Docs account, thereby allowing you to access your documents from anywhere. You won’t even have to worry about losing your important documents in case your PC fails you.

Windows 7 Libraries Back Up

To locate your documents, music, pictures, and videos spread across different places on your hard drive; Microsoft has gifted its valued users with an easy to use Windows 7’s Libraries feature. Its only drawback is that it doesn’t support network locations. This is a major setback for someone who has more than one system and the required file is residing on another hard drive.

Here’s where Win7 Library Tool (freeware) will be useful because it makes adding network folders to your Libraries pretty easy. So, for example, if I want to listen to songs that are on my brother’s PC, I can easily do that by adding his Songs folder to my Music Library. Another neat feature of this tool is its ability to provide a centralized location for modifying your Library settings. Even the icons for various Libraries are customizable.

My favorite feature of the Win7 Library Tool is library backups it creates. If you’ve reinstalled Windows or moved to another computer you can easily restore your libraries by adding the set of libraries you saved earlier.

overnightpcrepair fastest pc repair in los angeles call 877-938-8777