Automate Backups Simply with Backup Maker. I can’t stress this enough: Everyone should make a backup of their files.
Everyone. It’s not all that difficult, nor will it cost you anything — thanks to today’s program, BackUp Maker. BackUp Maker creates ZIP archives of your selected files, and can do so at regular intervals. I’ll walk you through the steps to make and restore a backup in the free Standard Edition, with “expert mode” disabled. First, you must select the files and/or folders to be archived. Next, you’ll need to set your execution interval. Now, we come to the backup type. Next, select a directory, CD/DVD or FTP server on which to save your files.
Here’s where you specify an optional name for your archive. Restoring the archived files to their original locations is as easy as clicking “Restore” in BackUp Maker. BackUp Maker offers a quick and simple way to make automated backups of any size; and I highly recommend it. Backup Your Files [Poll] So last week’s Make Use Of poll covered what your favorite office suite was.
![Backup Your Files [Poll]](http://cdn.pearltrees.com/s/pic/th/what-backup-your-files-poll-5341429)
We offered up either Open Office of Microsoft Office. Open Office came out ahead and some other interesting answers popped up in the comments. Check them out and if you haven’t voted, feel free to chime in now! So far there are 1,084 votes. 568 for Open Office and 459 for Microsoft Office. This week we will be asking you ““ our loyal MakeUseOf readers if you backup your files and how?
Cloning Hard Drive. Save, Restore, Fix a Broken MBR with MBRWizard [Windows] MBR, if you are unfamiliar, is the first sector of your hard disk.
![Save, Restore, Fix a Broken MBR with MBRWizard [Windows]](http://cdn.pearltrees.com/s/pic/th/restore-mbrwizard-windows-5246194)
It is just 512 bytes in size, but boy are those 512 bytes important or what? The MBR is used for bootstrapping operating systems, holding the primary partition table of your disk and other important information. You take this information away and chances are you will not be able to boot the operating system. While installing the operating system, the installer takes care of writing appropriately to the first 512 bytes to allow the operating system to boot and detect partitions.
Once that has been done, you do not have direct access to the MBR (which is generally not recommended). MBRWizard allows you to save/restore MBR, fix a corrupt MBR, you can hide/unhide hard disk partitions, make a partition bootable or delete it all together, make a flash disk bootable etc. MBRWizard is a command line utility you can download from here. Here are a few examples. To create a backup of MBR MBRWiz /save=C:\savedMBR MBRWiz /List. How to Prepare Yourself for System Restore From Scratch. Back in January I treated myself to a new laptop, a mobile workstation.
Compared to my old laptop, the new machine was operating at the speed of light. However, with all the software that came and went over the months, and despite regular system maintenance, some minor but annoying bugs had crept in along with the performance slowly declining. At some point reinstalling your machine simply is inevitable. Although my system was not at that point yet, I decided it was time to clear the battlefield last weekend. To me this is not a tedious task, I actually quite enjoy the process.