My Wife and I had a pretty bad scare with losing all of our important information this past week.

Looks like everything is okay, but I'd like to avoid the stress of anything like that ever happening again. I've always taken a "it'll never happen to me" attitude about losing my hard drive, so I never learned how to back it up.

What's the best way to back up my hard drive?

TIA

havent tried it yet but here is what ive found. its up to you to test if it you can
http://free-backup.info/

Best way is buy an external HD or an HD pocket and regularly copy all your important documents.

I'll agree with ZFR. I picked up a 320GB external hard drive and backed up the important stuff there.

'Course, I waited to do that until my machine blue-screened on me a couple of times, couldn't find the OS, and wouldn't boot...

It does help to keep the important data in one spot... I've got a personal documents folder (not My Documents, one *I* control) and an install folder. All installation source (downloads, etc.) goes into the install folder and gets run from there... very handy having it all in one spot.

How much does one of these external hard drives cost? BTW, 320 GB is a lot more than my computer has (I believe it's only about 80 GB), so a smaller (ie: cheaper) one would probably work just as well for me.

I'll try that when I get home Harky!

I picked mine up at the CompUSA closing-down-the-store sale for around $150. I think it was normally $200 or so.

As for it being a lot bigger than your current HD, probably true. The laptop I needed it for only had an 80GB hard drive.

My new laptop, however, has a 250GB hard drive... so buy it not just for today, but for tomorrow as well. 320GB could keep several copies of your hard drive if needed...

Yep, 320 Gig would be a little ridiculous if your regular harddrive is only 80, but the choice is yours of course. An external harddrive costs pretty much the same as a regular one, or not much more anyway. Below is a link to a site with different brands which is good for price comparison.

http://www.superwarehouse.com/extern...rives/c2b/2361

Thanks again guys. How do you go about actually copying a hard drive? Do you have to copy a file at a time, or can I choose to copy the entire thing all at once?

You can choose to copy the whole thing at once... but if you actually mean the entire hard drive it probably won't work. You can copy whole folders at a time though... :D

To back up the entire thing, windows has a backup tool (under accessories > system tools).

There are a few imagin programs that will create a full image of your HDD backing up everything (System Setting, files etc)

Click here for info on the solutions that the company I work for (Symantec) offer.

There is also a product called BackupExec System Recovery for Desktops that is quite good as well but this is aimed at out Corporate Customers (I still use it at home though)

All of this can be backed up to a external HDD or DVD.