Disk Backup Imaging

I‘ve been a fan of disk imaging software (a type of backup software) for some time.  Disk imaging software takes a complete snapshot of your computer so in the event of a hard drive failure you can recover quickly to exactly where you were at the last backup - programs, settings and all.  In recent years the software has come on in leaps and bounds, supporting quick incremental backups, and more recently being able to restore your image to totally different hardware and having the software figure out what extra drivers you may need to install.  My favourite is Acronis True Image, its cheap and powerful.

One of its other very useful features is the ability to easily increase the size of your hard drive without having to reinstall your whole system onto a new drive.  You can either clone your existing drive onto a new drive directly (by plugging them both into your PC) or you can create an image of your current system onto a USB hard drive, replace your computer hard drive, then restore the image from your USB drive to the new drive.  The software will automatically increase the size of your partitions (ie. C: drive, E: drive etc) so for example if you had a 80GB hard drive with a C: partition with 40GB and an E: partition with 40GB and used Acronis to replace it with a 1000GB drive, Acronis would automatically make C: and E: drive 500GB each.  Very handy, and pretty simple.