Installation/driver discs are unfortunately a necessary evil we all have to live with currently, and what typically drives people up a wall is best described like this:

You buy a printer. It has proprietary software needed to function, which obviously comes on an installation CD. A year or two later you replace your computer and need to reinstall the printer again, so you go to find the disc. It’s gone. You swear that you put it back in the box after you were done using it, but it’s nowhere to be found. Desperate, you go to the OEM’s web site to download drivers and download them, but it’s missing features that the CD installed originally.

This is unfortunately a familiar story to many.

The way to backup an installation disc to the cloud is as follows. For this example the free cloud backup medium I’ll be using is Microsoft SkyDrive, who offers 25GB of free storage to anyone who wants it:

1. Sign up for a free SkyDrive account (if you have a Hotmail account, you already have one).

2. Create an ISO of the installation disc locally using ImgBurn (free).

3. The resulting ISO file will most likely be over 50MB, which is over the maximum allowed file size allowed per file on SkyDrive, so we’ll need to break that up. Use 7-Zip (free) to create an archive of the file in 50MB pieces.

4. Upload the multi-file archive to a private folder in your SkyDrive account.

5. When you need the disc again, simply download the archive files, use 7-Zip to get the ISO back, then use ImgBurn once again to burn the ISO direct-to-disc and it’s a done deal.

Final notes

I used SkyDrive as my cloud-based backup medium, but if you’d rather use something else, go right ahead – but be mindful of individual file size limitations for the service you use. If you have to break up the ISO, you know how using the 7-Zip method above.

Some of you may get the idea of emailing files to yourself if using webmail. I recommend against this due to it being a hassle. Most webmail providers currently only allow a maximum 25MB file attachment per email. This can lead to a CD’s worth (700MB) of data being 28 individual files, meaning you’d potentially have to send 28 individual emails to yourself just to back up a single CD. In addition, some webmail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail may in fact freeze your account temporarily if all of a sudden you send a bunch of large email attachments to yourself (they consider it abuse of their respective mail systems).

For those that choose to send sensitive archive data to the cloud but want better privacy concerning the data, you can opt to make archives that are password protected and encrypted. When creating a 7-Zip archive, check the box for “Encrypt file names” using AES-256 encryption and set a password. For split volumes you will be required to use the 7z format and not ZIP.

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