Test Hardware First

If you've purchased hard drives or other external devices, connect them and make sure your computer can write to and read from them before installing your backup software. Although I've seen a few cases in which a backup application can communicate with a device that does not otherwise appear visible to the computer, you are unlikely to encounter such a situation with hard drives and optical drives. If you connect a device after installing your backup software and it does not work, it will be harder to determine whether the device or the software is at fault.