How To Keep Your Website Secure

This is a belated follow on to my last blog post – How To Keep Your Computer Secure

This was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks ago, but it’s the start of lambing time so I’m fairly tied up with that at present, I have however found a spare hour this morning to write this blog post.

As a web host (amongst other things), we deal with hacked accounts on a daily basis, anyone that’s ever fallen victim to this knows how much of a pain it can be to get a website back to normal after it’s been infected. So here are a few steps you can use to help prevent the hackers getting access in the first place!

1. Keep Your Scripts Up To Date

This is the most common way for a hacker to gain access to your account, all it takes is one line of poorly written code and kablamo, the hacker can inject malicious code into your files.

That’s why it’s vital to keep everything up to date, script updates don’t just contain new features, but they also contain important security fixes.

Open source scripts such as Joomla, Wordpress and OSCommerce are particularly vulnerable, as the code is, as the name suggests, open source, so the hackers have access to all of the code, making it very easy for them to go through to find anything that’s been badly written. Once a weakness is found, it spreads like wildfire across the message boards and leads to more infected websites.

So please, as soon as you see a new update available for any scripts you are using – download and install them, it’ll save you a lot of problems in the long run.

2. Remove Unused Scripts!

It seems obvious, but I know a lot of you don’t do it. (tut tut)

As I said before, all it takes is one line of badly written code for hackers to gain access to your account, so the more code you have uploaded, the more chance you have of being hacked.

It doesn’t matter if the code is uploaded to some obscure place, or to a site that is no longer online, if the code exists on your site the hackers will find it, so if you have any old scripts on your account that you are no longer using, delete them, leaving them on the account is asking for trouble.

3. Do You Really Need That Plugin?

As well as removing unused scripts, it would be a good idea to go through the scripts that you do use and get rid of anything on there that isn’t a fundamental part of your site.

Take Wordpress plugins for example, if you have a Wordpress blog, go into the admin area and click on “Plugins”, and I’d like to bet there are a lot of inactive plugins on there, why?

If you aren’t using a plugin, delete it from your webspace, all it’s doing is sitting there waiting for someone to find it so make sure you get rid of any un-used plugins and themes, don’t make it easy for them

4. Use SFTP

SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol and works in the same way as standard FTP, but with SFTP all commands and data are encrypted.

Here’s a graphical example of Pete the packet sniffer stealing your FTP password “sexybeast4321″:

As you can see, the password is sent in plan text, meaning Pete now has your password.

Now compare that to if you were using SFTP:

You can see that the password is now encrypted, meaning Pete can’t get access to your details.

So, How Do You Use SFTP?

Most FTP clients now support SFTP, and it’s just a case of selecting SFTP as the protocol instead of standard FTP, here’s what it looks like in CuteFTP Pro:

There are bazillions of FTP clients out there, so it’s impossible for me to show you how to set it up in every one of them, so if you just look in the help files for your FTP client and do a search for “SFTP” you should be able to find what you need, and as always, Google is your friend for things like this.

One final thing you’ll need to know if the SSH/SFTP port of your web server, to find this you can either contact your host, or if you are using a cPanel based account, log into your cPanel, click on “FTP Accounts” > “Configure FTP Client” and you’ll see the port listed on that page.

If you follow those 4 steps you should minimize the risk of your account being hacked, it wont turn your account into Alcatraz, but it will go a long way to securing it. Most of it is down to regular maintenance of your scripts, SFTP helps add an extra level of security but if you have insecure scripts on there, it’ll do no good.

There’s also the obvious things like changing your cPanel/FTP password at regular intervals, but I’m sure you all do that anyway

Even after this, there’s still a chance of getting hacked, so what do you do if you get hacked?

Contact Your Host

It may be possible to restore your account from a backup, so contacting your host right away is a good course of action, if they can restore to a point before the hacking, it gives you time to go in and clean up the old scripts that allowed the hackers to gain access.

If there are no clean backups available, then unfortunately there’s nothing for it but to clean out the infected files manually. If you have a copy of your sites on your computer (which you really should have), you may find it quicker to delete the site on your web space and re-upload from the copy on your computer.

You should also take into account that when hackers do get access to your site, they won’t just infect the website they gained the access to, they’ll infect everything on your account. So even if you have 1 bad Wordpress installation and 10 good, the 10 good will be infected as well.

So to minimize this you can get yourself a reseller account and run each domain on it’s own cPanel, meaning if a site does get hacked, you only have 1 site to clean up, not every site you’ll ever run. In general you’ll find reseller accounts are only a few dollars more than what you are currently paying so it’s well worth the upgrade, if only for the piece of mind it’ll bring you.

I think that covers everything, I hope I haven’t scared you too much

If you have any questions, or any other security measures that you use, please feel free to bombard the comments section.

Regards,
Dan

How To Keep Your Computer Secure

Why is an Internet Marketing blog talking about PC security, surely this has nothing to do with me making money, I’ve a good mind to un-subscribe from all your mailing lists, call you lots of rude names, and report you to the FBI for providing misleading free information, you…..you…..der brain!

There, I got it out of the way for you, so please don’t send me any daft emails complaining about the wide range of subjects, think how boring it would be if every post talked about tracking, conversions, statistics and sales. Besides, this post is much, much more important.

As an Internet Marketer it’s vital to keep your computer in tip top shape, neglecting your computer would be like a taxi driver neglecting his car, so it’s not something you can sit back and forget about.

So as a fully qualified geek, I thought I’d show you how I secure my system, and my websites.

It’s important that you do both, a lot of people will secure their system but leave any old junk on their webspace, and vice versa – BOTH NEED PROTECTING!

As a web host, we deal with web based exploits on a daily basis, 99% of the time these are down to weak, out of date scripts that are on the account, but more on that later on. I’ll start with your computer first.

How I Secure My Computer

Yes, I said computer. I’m not nearly smug enough to have a MAC…..it’s a joke, don’t go un-subscrbing you MAC users, I love you really! But this part of the guide is aimed at those of us that are still supporting good ‘ol Billy G.

First of all we need to know what our computer needs protecting against, there are loads of different threats out there, and unfortunately it usually takes more than one program to keep you clean. No one program will ever be able to detect 100% of viruses and exploits, but we can do our best to minimize the risk by using as much protection as we can.

*Insert Naked Gun Condom Joke Here*

We need to make sure our machines are protected against Viruses, Malware, Spyware, Trojans, Keyloggers, Crapware, and loads of other cool stuff.

So without any further tasteless jokes, here’s what I use to keep me protected. And I’ll also point out that none of these links are affiliate links, infact most of the things I recommend are free!

My Anti-Virus Protection

I use NOD32 for my anti-virus protection, I’ve been using it for as long as I can remember and it’s always served me very well. There has been the odd thing that it’s missed, but no anti-virus software will ever find 100% of the threats that are out there.

NOD32 provides me with great protection (too soon to reuse the Naked Gun joke?) against Viruses, Malware, Trojans and other exploits. It protects me when I’m surfing the Internet, reading emails, or just generally larking around.

It manages to do all that in the background, without slowing the machine down, so it certainly isn’t a resource hog. (Yeah, I’m looking at you Norton)

Runs: All the time

Price: Free trial, then around $50/£30 per year

My Anti-Malware Protection

Malware does really come under the same heading as anti-virus protection, but sometimes your anti-virus software wont be able to get rid of every little trace of the Malware/Virus. So at times like this an on demand scanner can come in really useful.

For this, I use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (free version). It allows me to run a scan at any time, and gives you that added bit of protection. It’s almost like getting a 2nd opinion when going to the Doctors, NOD32 may tell you you’re fine, but Malwarebytes may be able to tell you otherwise

Runs: On demand

Price: Free (Paid version also available)

My Anti-Spyware Protection

Spyware can be a massive pain in the….hard drive. It generally gathers information from your computer without your knowledge, and then uses that information to bombard you with advertisements. It can also be used in a much more sinister way, such as stealing credit card details and other personal information, so it’s important to be well protected.

I use Spybot Search & Destroy to keep my machine clear of Spyware. Not only does it remove any Spyware that has found its way onto my PC, it also “Immunizes” the machine from the most common threats for added piece of mine. For me, Spybot is a must have piece of software!

Runs: On demand & in background depending on the configuration

Price: Free

Anti-Crap Protection

Anti-Crap is a technical name for all of the junk files that build up on your machine over the course of a day/week/month/eternity. These includes things like temp files, cookies, history, unused reg keys and much, much more.

Using a piece of anti-crap software is a great way to improve your PC’s performance.

To get rid of all the crap on my machine, I use CCleaner (used to be called Crap Cleaner before the PC police decided it was offensive…..).

CCleaner can be configured to run every time your PC boots up, so each time you start the day you can be safe in the knowledge that all the crap from the previous day has gone, and you can start a fresh

Runs: On startup and On demand

Price: Free

So there you have it, the 4 programs I use to keep my machine clean. And just incase you missed the links, if you click on the product images above, they’ll take you off to the applicable websites.

I know a lot of you will use other programs, and I’m not suggesting those listed are any better, or worse, but it’s what I use to very good effect. Although if you do have a different configuration, feel free to leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.

I was going to go on and talk about website security, but I think that if I did, the post would drag on for a bit, so I’ll leave it there for now and I’ll talk about how to secure your websites in the next blog post.

So as always, thanks for reading and please do leave any questions of comments below.

Cheers,
Dan

How I Made $580 Last Month By Doing Nothing

The subject for this blog post sounds like one of those delightful spam emails we all receive doesn’t it?

But luckily for you I haven’t changed career paths to become one of the Norths leading Viagra suppliers to hill farmers, they’ll have to wait for their little blue pills, because I’ve found something far more lucrative.

Over the past month (6th Dec – 6th Jan), I’ve made $580 in affiliate commissions from a single product, just by sitting on my backside twiddling my thumbs. I’ve genuinely not done a single thing in the past month to promote the product, no emails, no blog posts, no articles – nothing!

I’ve made these commissions using something I like to call “The Leech Method”. Although to be honest I have a feeling the method may not actually be mine, and I read about it somewhere, so if you are reading this and you are the creator of the “Leech Method”, good for you, it works!

Before I go on, here are the commissions for the “Multi Profit Websites” product for the 1 month period:

I’ve highlighted 2 rebills which came from my initial promo back in November, so I’ve taken them off the total, bringing the total commissions for the month down to around $580.

And here’s how I did it….

It all started back on October 13th with the following blog post:

http://www.elpassoblog.com/multi-profit-websites-lets-go-robot/

Multi Profit Websites was due to launch on October 27th, so I created a blog post showing a demo site that I had created using the software and gave an overview of the product. I then emailed you guys to show you it, so I gathered some interest that way, but, and I’ll be honest and say this was the main reason for the post. I knew there was no competition on Google for the phrase “Multi Profit Websites”, so a well written blog post would get me onto the first page in just a few hours. (And it did)

Fast forward to the 21st October, 6 days before the launch of Multi Profit Websites, and I wrote the following post:

http://www.elpassoblog.com/multi-profit-website-bonuses/

It was posted for the same reason as my 1st post, to gather interest in the product, but also to get another link on the 1st page of Google.

That’s the only promotion I did on my blog, so I managed to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, I got you guys interested in the product, and I also got 2 pages on the 1st page of Google. But I wasn’t finished.

You’ll remember in the 1st blog post, I showed a demo site that I’d created using Multi Profit Websites. The site was hosted on the main multiprofitwebsites.com domain:

http://www.multiprofitwebsites.com/usersites/elpasso/

I wasn’t the only person who could have taken advantage of this, loads of people had demo sites up on the domain, but very few chose to utilize this.

I knew that if I got a couple of back links to that site, I’d automatically get the number 2 spot on Google, directly under the official multiprofitwebsites.com site.

So I wrote an article, submitted it to ezinearticles and hey presto:

Finally, I created a quick mini site using the domain http://multi-profit-websites.net

On the mini site I wrote about the product, showed off my demo site, added some related videos and….well, take a look!

So all of these different sites were on the front page of Google at one point. I’ve just taken a quick look and I still occupy the following positions on Google for the search term “Multi profit Websites”:

#2
#5
#6
#7
#11

That’s great, but how do these sites keep making me a commission whilst I plan my move into the Viagra niche?

Multi Profit Websites is a very popular product, and loads of affiliates promote it. So each time an affiliate promotes MPW, they make the product known to a new buyer. A lot of these buyers will research a product before buying, and what do they use to research? GOOGLE!

All I’m doing is leeching off the other affiliates work, I let them do the leg work, and I close the deal by providing the content that the potential buyer is looking for.

And that final point is very important. MPW is a great product, so it’s very easy for me to write about, I have tons of experience using it, so I can put my view across very well on the product. What you shouldn’t do is pick any old product, and simply rewrite the sales page, or fill the pages with any old crap.

Give the potential buyer the information they are looking for. If you are finding it hard to enthuse about the product, then there’s a good chance the product is actually pretty crap, and you don’t really want to have anything to do with a bad product….and as I write this it’s snowing cats and badgers, so I’d best sign off before the power goes!

So that’s everything covered – “The Leech Method”.

As always, let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, etc, etc, etc.

And if you want a big discount on the normal MPW price, you can get one by going through the following link:

Multi Profit Websites Discount

Regards,
Dan

How I Dominated Google For Resell Rights Fortune

How I Dominated Google For Resell Rights Fortune

Hello, welcome, greetings, good to see you etc, etc, etc.

Today I come bearing gifts, it’s not gold, frankincense and mur, but it’s something that could be just as valuable in the long run. I’m going to show you how I “took over” Google during the launch of Resell Rights Fortune.

Just a bit of background info before we get started.

Resell Rights Fortune is a product from Socrates Socratous, that was released on the 9th June. The product allows you to save time, by searching through a database full of different resale rights and private label products – eBooks, scripts, software, videos and so on.

Socrates asked me to promote the product for him a couple of weeks before the launch, so I put my thinking cap on and decided upon a plan of action.

As there was still 2 weeks until the launch, I decided to use a method I’d used in the past. I’d create a simple Wordpress Blog, purchase a related domain name, and add some good content to the blog that relates to the product, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll end up with a good placement on Google.

I’m pleased to report that my plan worked, take a look at the image below!

As you can see, I take the first, second, fourth and fifth position on Google for the term “Resell Rights Fortune“, I even pushed down the actual Resell Rights Fortune site into 3rd place. (Sorry Socrates:-))

You are probably thinking that’s all well and good, but does it actually get any traffic?

Simple answer, yes, it does. More proof for you below:

As you can see, the site received 207 hits from Google during the launch period, all of these people looking for more information on the Resell Rights Fortune product.

The site that took me less than 2 hours to setup, has helped to bring in over $2,000 in sales of the product so far, so it does work! Yes, I did send out a mailing to my list that also contributed to the sales total, but the number of clicks generated from the email was 182, so even if we say it was a 50/50 split between the list and the site, it’s still $1,000 which can’t be sniffed at for 1 simple site.

So hopefully I’ve given you enough evidence there to show you that what I did does actually bring back results, so here is EXACTLY how I did it:

1. I purchased the domain name www.resellrightsfortunereview.com from D9 Hosting. ($9.99 per year)

2. I found a Wordpress theme that I liked, and then set up a blog on the domain which again, I hosted with D9 Hosting. ($6.95 per month)

3. I created a quick “sneak preview” video showing you what it was like inside the members area. I then distributed the video to a network of video sites using Heyspread.

4. I wrote some posts that I could put on the blog, each showing the reader different aspects of the Resell Rights Fortune (RRF) Product.

5. I put a link to the RRF blog on this blog, so Google could find it.

6. Once Google had indexed the site, I posted a new article every few days to keep the content fresh.

That’s it!

There really is nothing to it, so why not give it a try next time there’s a big product launch coming up? It’s a lot easier to get a few hundred hits from Google than to build a few hundred new mailing list subscribers

I’ve also just realized that I did make a blog post similar to this way back in October…..although in that promotion I used a slightly different method, so if you want another twist on the method check out the following post:

http://www.elpassoblog.com/how-one-video-dominated-google-for-john-thornhill-coaching/

And that just about wraps it up for this weeks blog post, I know a lot of you are first time readers, so I hope you found the information useful, and do let me know if you have any questions or feedback by leaving a comment in the section below.

Cheers!
Dan

How To Make A Full PC Backup And Restore After Hard Drive Failure

Wow, that’s a bit of a long title isn’t it. I wonder if the search engines will like it? At least it’s nice and descriptive!

This post is going to be another of my free “How To” guides, but this time I’m not going to be showing you anything Website, or Internet Marketing related. I’m going to show you how to do something everyone with a computer should do at some point – get a full backup of your computer!

I don’t just mean important files and your favourite holiday snaps, I mean a backup of EVERYTHING. Program files, Windows, System Files/Folders, hard drive partitions and so on. If you have a backup of absolutely everything on your computer, you are covered in the event of a hard drive failure and can be back up and running as if nothing has happened in a matter of minutes.

I haven’t just thought of this subject off the top of my head, I had a hard drive failure last week so whilst I did the backup/restore procedure I took some pictures so I could show you all how to make a full computer backup, and then restore it on a new drive if things go bad. Here’s the story.

I was happily working away one day, when suddenly the computer stopped responding. I had no choice but to do a hard power down. (Turn it off and on again!)

During the boot process, I was shown an error message saying that one of the hard drives installed on the computer was failing, and I should get a backup of everything ASAP.

So as soon as I saw that message, I booted up and generated a full backup using Acronis True Image Home – and I’m not just doing a sly bit of product placement here, I do actually use the software I’m recommending :-0

**Just a side point for any techie’s reading before you try and trip me up – the system has 2 drives in a RAID 0 setup, and 1 of the drives was in the process of failing, it hadn’t totally given up the ghost, hence I was able to boot up**

Don’t worry if the above paragraph goes over your head, it’s not important!

Of course if you run a backup, you need somewhere to store that backup. There’s no point running a backup and then saving it on the drive that is failing. So you really need another drive to store your backups on, I personally use an external USB hard drive. They are dirt cheap at the moment so there’s no excuse not to have one.

I flew through that section a bit, so here’s how to create a full system backup in some easy to manage steps:

*Before I start, I should point out that I’m running Windows Vista Home Edition. So if you are running XP home, professional, or have a MAC then the screens may look slightly different from how the appear on here*

1. Plug in your external USB hard drive (ignore this step if you are using an internal drive)

2. Open up Acronis True Image Home (15 day free trial available)

3. Click on the “Backup” Icon

4. Click on the “My Computer” icon to create a backup of the entire disk or partition

5. Select the disk you would like to make a backup of and click “Next”

6. As this is your 1st backup, select the “Create new backup archive” option, and then click on the “Browse” button to locate your external drive. When you have selected a location to save the backup to (your external hard drive), click on “Next”

7. You will then be asked if you’d like to schedule the backup, at this time we want to create the back up right away, so select “Do not schedule”, but it’s worth remembering you can use the program to make an automated backup for you on a daily, or weekly basis.

8. Next you are asked to select the backup method, as this is your first backup, you can select “Incremental”. This will create a full backup if it’s your 1st time (don’t be nervous), or if you are adding to an existing backup it will only backup the files that have changed since your last backup.

9. You can then choose to exclude certain files from the backup, this includes hidden files, system files, or any other filenames that you specify using custom criteria. As we want to backup absolutely everything, leave the boxes unchecked and click on “Next”

10. The next few steps can all be left as they are. So keep clicking “Next” until you get to the summary screen.

11. Make sure the “Run task now” box is checked, and then click on “Proceed”

12. You will then see a status bar showing you the progress of your backup. When the backup generation is complete, a confirmation will appear on screen and you can unplug your external hard drive, safe in the knowledge you have a full backup incase of a system, or hardware failure.

If you want to confirm everything has been backed up correctly, just open up your external drive and locate where you saved the backup. You should then be able to see your backup archives in all their glory!

So that’s the backup out of the way, even if you don’t think a system failure or hard drive combustion (can a hard drive combust?) will ever happen to you, I’d urge you all to make a full backup of your system! It only takes a few minutes to start the backup process, and it will save you LOTS of hassle if your computer goes belly up like mine did. With a full system backup you can restore everything to exactly how it was before a crash, you don’t need to reinstall any programs or operating systems!

Anyway, back to my story. If you have a short attention span, here’s where we are at:

One of my hard drives failed, so I made a full system backup onto an external hard drive.

The next step was to replace the faulty drive.

As I had a RAID 0 setup, which in very basic terms is a bit like having 2 disks running as 1, doubling your disk space. The new disk would need to be a replica of the other disk – or so I was told!

So I decided that instead if replacing just the faulty hard drive, I would replace both of them with brand new drives, in the process I’d increase the disk space on the computer from 300GB to 1TB, hard drives are dirt cheap now so it seemed silly not to. A good UK supplier of all things hardware related is CCL Online, I get all of my computer “bits” from there. So if you are after a new external or internal drive I can highly recommend them.

My new drives arrived the next day, so my next task was to remove the 2 old drives and replace them with the new ones. When I was taking them out, I made sure to make a note of which was the faulty drive so I could keep the remaining good drive for future use.

The actual installing of the new drives is pretty simple, although I suppose it all depends on your PC case. From the image below, you can see that my 2 drives are at the bottom of the case, and slide in and out. Yours may be positioned in a different place but the general idea is the same. You need to slide out the dock, and unscrew the old hard drive, replacing it with the new one. You’ll then have 2 connections going into the drive, the blue connector you can see on the image is the SATA cable that will go into your motherboard, and the wider, multi-coloured cable is the power cable, and this goes into the power supply.

**Top tip**

If one of your leads going into the hard drive is a wider, white/cream coloured cable then you will have an IDE hard drive, and not SATA, so bear that in mind if you are looking to replace a drive!

When you have ensured that your new drives are in place, you can turn on your computer. This next step depends on your computer setup, but you may be able to see a screen showing you the drives that are installed on your computer. As you can see from the image below, both of my new drives appear:

There are then 2 ways to do the next step. If you think about it, you’ve now got a brand new drive installed, but the drive is clean, it has no data on it at all – not even an operating system.

So here are your 2 options:

1. Reinstall windows using your boot CD

2. Use the Acronis boot disk to restore everything

Option 2 is the quickest option, as it allows you to skip the reinstall windows step. The Acronis boot disk allows you to boot up, without an operating system, and restore your computer from the backup we took earlier. But it’s only available if you purchase the full version of the software, not the 15 day trial.

I own the full version of the software, so I’ll show you how to use the boot disk. The first step is to create the rescue disk..maybe I should have put this further up in the article

Here’s how to create your Acronis boot disk:

1. Open up Acronis True Image Home

2. Click on “System Information”

3. Click on “Create Acronis bootable media”

Go through the Wizard clicking “Next” when prompted, and you can then burn the boot disk to CD (or DVD):

You should now have either your Acronis rescue boot disk, or your Windows boot disk ready to go.

So the next thing you need to do is go into the BIOS and change the primary boot device to your CD/DVD drive, this will allow us to boot using the CD.

The way to do this will vary depending on the BIOS your are using, I’m using a Dell Dimension 9200 Desktop PC with the DXP061 BIOS…at least that’s what it said on the screen

To get into the BIOS on a Dell PC, power up the PC and keep tapping the F2 key until the blue screen appears.

When the blue screen appears, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to go down to the “Boot Sequence” option, push “Enter” on your keyboard, then move down to “Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive” and push the space bar on your keyboard to set it as the primary boot device. You can then insert your CD (Windows or the Acronis boot CD), save the changes and then exit.

**Top Tip**

Before changing the order of the boot sequence, make a note of the old boot sequence then you can easily change it back when we are done!

When the computer reboots, it will boot using the CD you just entered in the drive. If you are reinstalling Windows go through the installation process to do a clean install, once installed, you can download the free 15 day trial of Acronis True image home. If you open it up we can then restore the backup we took earlier, as shown below.

Using the Acronis boot disk means we can skip the above step, and get straight down to restoring our backup.

To restore the backup using Acronis True Image Home 2009:

1. Click on “Backup and Restore”

2. Click on “Manage and Restore”

3. Click on the “Browse” button to locate the backup we saved on our external drive

4. When you’ve found the backup, click on one of the archives and click on “OK”

5. You’ll then see a summary of the backup, click on the backup and then click on the “Restore” icon towards the top of the page. Apologies for the quality of these pictures by the way, they were taken using my digital camera as I was doing the backup of my own PC!

6. You can then choose the restoration method, you can either restore individual files and folders, or you can do a full restore. This restores your computer back to the exact state it was in when you took the backup, this includes absolutely everything!

Select “Restore whole disks and partitions” and click on Next.

8. The next step asks us where we’d like to restore the data to, we need to select the new drive (or drives) that we have just installed. Select the new drive and click on Next.

If you have chosen to go down the Windows reinstall route, you may see a warning saying that the drive contains useful data, and restoring the backup will delete that data. If the message appears, click on “OK”.

You will then be shown a summary of the actions that will be taken, click on “Proceed”.

Your computer will then reboot and the restore process will begin, you’ll be able to see a dialog box showing you the progress of the restoration.

When this is complete, your computer should boot back up as normal and will be in the same state it was when you took the backup, but this time you’ll be running on a new hard drive and not the old faulty one

**Top Tip**

Remember to go back into your BIOS and set the boot sequence back to normal, this will ensure you don’t keep booting from the CD each time you turn on your computer!

So, in a nutshell, that’s how you make a full system backup of your computer, and how you restore it. It’s a very simple task as long as you are using Acronis True Image Home, there is a 15 day free trial but I purchased the full version, it’s worth it just to be able to create the rescue boot disk…

But I’m not done yet.

This next step might not apply to you, but I’ve got some screenshots so I may as well use them

My computer was now restored to it’s old state, Windows Vista home was running as normal, and all of my installed programs were intact, but I did have one small problem.

As the new hard drives I had installed had a larger capacity than the old drives I removed, I needed to resize the partition so I could use the new space I had gained from changing the drives. When I restored using True Image home, it restores a full image of the old hard drive, including the drive size.

So I needed to resize the partition.

Normally doing this would mean a loss of data, but luckily I found some more Acronis software to use. I used the Acronis Disk Director suite, to quickly and easily increase the size of the partition, without losing any of the data I had just restored.

To increase the size of a hard drive partition, without losing any data:

1. Open up Acronis Disk Director Suite

2. Click on the partition size you want to increase

3. Click on the “Increase free space” icon

You will then be presented with an easy to use Wizard, go through the wizard until you get to the screen below, this then allows you to resize the partition. You can either take the space from another partition, or you can use the un-used space on the drive. (This is what I did)

When you have gone through the Wizard, you’ll see a confirmation on screen of the tasks that will be undertaken. When you are happy with this, click on the “Commit” button, your computer will then reboot and the changes will be made.

When you reboot, and go into “My Computer” you should be able to see that the size of the disk has been changed, and the software has done it’s job correctly

And there you have it, what started out as a simple blog post has morphed in what seems to have been one of my longest posts ever. I should really have turned it into an eBook…maybe I still could, but I think it should prove to be a very useful free resource. If something like this existed when my hard drive died it would have saved me a lot of research time, so hopefully it will help someone out there do the same.

So thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

*Update*

You’ve probably already guessed that the links to the software I used ARE affiliate links…I need to get something out of the hours of typing don’t I?

But when I signed up to the affiliate program, they did send me a list of coupon codes that can be used against all Acronis products. I don’t know if they will keep sending me new coupons each month, as the coupons I have at present are for May 2009 only, so I’ve listed them all in a section on the blog, and I’ll update it with more Acronis coupon codes if and when I get them.

Thanks for reading,
Dan

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