BE YOUR OWN CLOUD!
BACKING UP YOUR HARD DRIVE THE EASY WAY
or "Learn to Clone it yourself at home in your spare time."

How you gonna survive when the crash comes due? Not the stock market crash and economy crash that Bush Jr and his father's MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE LACKEY DICK CHENEY engineered, . No, the one on your PC that steals years of good information and writing! When your website crashes, maybe you couldn't pay the annual fee, or maybe your PC crashes. Or maybe there is a solar incident.

Tape back up is passe. Zip Drives are smallish and you still gotta have a second PC to zip them to......Most of us do, that old WIN 98 still works. I know my 20 year old DELL did and my  WIN 98 works so well, that's where all my current files are. I also backed up in a pair of XPs so I don't feel too bad not having ALL my files (thousands of articles are online.) on the new, ASUS WIN 8 machine

But hey, today kiddies we learn that there is a fairly cheap fast way to insure your PC will not lose its data. I just learned about it from a farmer in Idaho. My online Tekkie resource. If a farmer has figured this out, you sure can.

This started the other day when something started making noise in my PC! A GRRRRRRRRRR kind of growl. A coffee grinder noise. I wrote my Idaho pal who's no potato in the programming area. "Hey, Randall, I have this new noise! GRIND GRIND coming from back of my PC. Only when it's ON, of course.  If this coffee grinder I'm typing on doesn't start producing COLUMBIAN FINE GRIND I'm going to have to do something. Like get a NEW PC? Switch data to another machine in the house? Networking them with a wire drilled through the wall? LOOKS hard to do."

"Nahhh, he answered by immediate EMAIL. I swear, the guy never sleeps. He must have a bell that tells him when EMAIL arrives. "A piece of cake, go fine with that coffee you're grinding. Just CLONE YOURSELF".

"HUH?" I said.

"Yeah. Create a slave hard drive."
"Oh my", I thought then said, "that sounds very politically incorrect!"

"Nahhh, Go buy an online slave hard drive at BEST BUY dot com" and he sent me a headline, banner. "FOR SALE = Cheap Hard Drive, free installation, at BEST BUY"
Tthat means you take your motherboard in the way you take your feet in when you buy shoes.

"That link was  to a .pdf file page, and it was the current SALE at Best Buy. You probably have ADOBE PDF reader in your machine and when you get to this page, it will automatically load up enabling you to read a big graphic page.

The Hard Drive is: 40 Gigabyte - Western Digital - 7200 rpm - ATA 100 - $59.00 after $30 rebate. (people actually  paid $120 for the same thing about a year ago. Prices are waay down.) And here's the good part, if you're not only dumb as a screwdriver but dumb with one,  they will INSTALL IT for FREE. Take your PC down to the local BEST BUY store, tell them to install it as the SLAVE and leave your present HD alone. Ask them if they will CLONE the info on your old HD onto the new HD."

"If they do not do CLONING, then you can DL XXCopy from the web (free) and do it yourself. Then when your old HD dies you can go on using the new one. Or you can remove the old dead HD and set the JUMPER on the new HD to the MASTER position, plug the power connector from the OLD HD into the NEW HD, and you are back in business. With 40 GIGABYTES of storage room. And 3 years before you need to do it again. If your CURRENT HD is more than 3 years old- you are on borrowed time and you are pushing your luck! My first HD died with NO WARNING. I started it up one day and it sounded like a coffee can full of gravel, nothing worked. Was working perfectly the day before. So get on the stick, kid before your pot boils over and there's no more coffee ever again!"

First you buy a new Hard Drive. On the back side there is a JUMPER. Put the JUMPER on the SLAVE position. The other possible position is the MASTER position. You must start out with the new HD as the SLAVE to your present (OLD) HD to clone the info onto the new HD.

Second. Plug in the power connector. You will find that the power cable to your old HD has another connector on it, for attaching a SLAVE HD. Plug it into the back of the new HD. The other cable is for DATA, it too has an extra connector in the MIDDLE which must be connected to the new HD. You need to make a BOOT (startup)DISK if you don't already have one. A floppy disk. (Control panel> Add/Remove> Startup Disk) Make one now if you don't already have one. Then you must restart PC in DOS mode and run FDISK on Drive "D" which is the NEW HD. Your old HD is Drive "C". (DO NOT FORMAT DRIVE C!!!!) Format Drive "D". Set LARGE PARTITION.

Third. Use XXCopy to Clone drive C onto drive D. From memory, the DOS command is: XXCOPY C:\ D:\

You can use as is, with 2 HDs; drive C and drive D. Your CD ROM Drive letter will be "E", your CD Burner will be drive "F".

Or you can remove old HD. Save it as a duplicate set of files if it works. If it is dead, throw it away. You must place JUMPER on the MASTER position of the new HD, and switch cables so that new HD is on the END
of the cables (where the OLD HD was hooked up). You must use FDISK once again to assign the new HD as PRIMARY, and set the MBR (master boot record) onto the new drive so that it can run the PC.

This is the BRIEF version, from my memory, and may not be absolutely complete. When I do it, I have reference pages at hand so that I don't screw it up. If you don't feel like you are technically inclined enough to do this you should have a tekkie friend assist you. It seems a lot more complicated than it actually is. Like most things in life, once you have done it yourself it is no longer scary, or mysterious. Just a trip to go through. A learning experience."

Did I DO IT? NO. I'm waiting for columbian coffee grinds to present themself out of my machine. I believe in miracles.
 

<== FOR MORE MODERN METHOD, SEE CLOUD TECH for nearly free