Need to back up hard drive- help? (1 Viewer)

[John Wilson]

I am looking for suggestions as to the best way to completely back up my hard drive such that if I experience a drive crash, I can quickly and easily bring up my backup solution very quickly. I have read that some people install an identical slave drive and just do a complete copy to it periodically. This seems feasible but how would I go about implementing it?

Are there any other ways to do this? My system is as follows:

Dell Dimension 4100 P3-866 running XP PRO.
512 MB PC133
NTFS-formated 60GB HD partioned into 20GB and 40GB drives
MS Office 2000
IE6
OE6

I am very concerned that my documents and Outlook Express email files and settings be preserved.

I am looking for any and all possible solutions and a step-by-step procedure to implement it would be nice as well.:b

I don't ask for much, do I?

Thanks for your help/suggestions!

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Easiest method would be to buy a new hard drive (preferably a big bugger, 120gb upwards), install it as a second drive and use Norton Ghost to image your entire first drive to it whenever you want. Using a large second drive means you can keep more than one archive and still use it as a secondary data storage area. For day-to-day backups of your mail files, the backup facility within Windows would suffice.

No doubt someone will suggest using RAID but unless you really need up-to-the-second resiliance it's not necessary.

 

[Karl_Luph]

Sounds like a great idea John, wish I had done this before losing a hard drive.

 

[Tekara]

I like raid's because they are mindless once set up, don't have to remember anything once you get the mirror going. If one hardrive fails your computer won't be sent back a few days just a few seconds. Plus if the Raid solution is up to spec the hardrive failure won't even cause a computer shut-down as the second hardrive should kick right in.

if you don't want to buy a second hardrive and have a CD-burner, you can always go that route, I believe norton ghost will ghost to multiple cd's. . . though if you do go this route I wouldn't ghost everything.