How to restore files and programs if your hard drive dies

Having a good backup for your files is a lifesaver, and restoring from backups is easy if you are staying on the same computer. But what if you back up your hard drive and the drive dies?

It's easy to buy a new drive, put it in your computer and restore the backup files. If your computer dies, though, you'll have a harder time getting things back up and running.

One solution is a suite of programs from a company called Zinstall. Depending on your situation, Zinstall has a few apps that can help migrate your old programs to a new PC, but they're not free or cheap.

A copy of Zinstall WinWin, which is what you'll need to transfer from one PC to another, costs $119.

The transfer can happen wirelessly if both PCs can boot up and get online, or you can use an Ethernet cable.

If your old computer won't start but the hard drive is still good, you can take it out and use a USB hard drive adapter to connect the old drive to the new PC to do the transfer.

You'll need to have Windows installed on your new PC before using Zinstall.

If you’re a Macintosh user, you’ll have an easier time with these tasks, thanks to a Mac app called Carbon Copy Cloner. It does all the transferring of data, including the Mac operating system, and it works perfectly.