Ok so now that you are ready to come kill me (that saying if you have read my other thread about Partitioning) if you would please enlighten me about backing up your Hard Drive.

Now from what I hear backing up your HD is all the rave these days and that everyone is doing it. Well I will say I do partial backups... I have a 40GB RCA Jukebox that I store all my music on and with the rest of the space I store what is really nessacary to me which is my photo's and my 10GB folder named "install setups"

Like I stated in my other thread I have had my 160GB WD HD for awhile now and whether Iv'e just been lucky or not but I have never backed up my whole HD, just like I said my important stuff but my HD has never gone down.

Does anyone actually have a statistic on like how easily a HD can just..."fail"

The part that I lack on about backing up is so I make my "image" of my hard drive and the my hard drive fries and I have to buy a new one, how is this "image" going to put all my files from my old HD that in no way can possibly work anymore onto a new HD. I mean an "image" is an "image" not the actual files....

Yes maybe this sounds really newb to you but please spare me and enlighten me Thanks!

It depends why you want to back up your PC.

If you want to avoid losing important data (email, MP3, documents ....) then you would be best to only back up the important stuff you need. The advantage of this is that you will not be backing up Windows XP files so you don't need that much storage space and the backup is fairly quick. Disadvantage is that if your windows install gets screwed up you will first need to reinstall XP and then copy your backed up data back - this can take a while.

If you want to be able to restore your whole PC easily and quickly then you will need some sort of backup software that backs up the entire disk. Companies do this to their servers as they cannot afford to be without a server for long periods of time. Personally I think this is an overkill for home use - use Norton Ghost to take an image of your C: drive and keep that safe instead.

The next question is where do you back up to ? No point in backing up to the same disk because if the disk fails you're screwed

- Back up to CD/DV
- Back up to tape (exepensive)
- Back up to another disk

Personally I back up to another disk in my PC. If my windows install fails I can use the backup to recover. If my backup disk fails then no problem as it was only backup data anyway.

I use the Microsoft Briefcase. I create a briefcase on the 2nd disk and then put an icon on my desktop. Open the briefcase and drag all the important files you want to back up (email, favourites, ghost image, personal docs, mp3 ...) into the briefcase. This will copy all those file from your 1st disk into the briefcase on the 2nd. The beauty of using a briefcase is that each time you open it and select to sync the contents it only recopies new or changed stuff. so the 1st time you use it it will take a long time tyo copy but after that it's quick.

Only downside of the above method is you have to remember to synchronize the briefcase once in a while

Thanks for your help