Important

[Win2Win]

We have plenty of problem posts for PC's on here, and some are pretty serious. Although the vast majority can be fixed, at some point files will become unrecoverable, or your hard drive will become damaged or fail. I've had 2 failures in the last 5 years.

With the cost of hard drives these days (80GB's £40), it is simple to install another one, and copy all your important files, use a program called SecondCopy for this, fully automated and simple to use. You then have daily backups of all the important data, and you don't have to do anything once it is all setup. You can then use some of the new free space for storage of music, video clips, etc.

You can also get software to mirror your other hard drive, and if you have RAID on the motherboard, even better (but you need 2 hard drives the same).

Best place for hard drives is here http://www.dabs.com/productlist.aspx?&NavigationKey=11154&NavigationKey=40896&NavigationKey=4294960152&NavigationKey=40182&CategorySelectedId=11154&PageMode=1

I'm sure Glos can do a nice Sticky on how to install & format the drive, and what folders are best backed up....eh Glos :D

[GlosRFC]

I could, but it depends on whether you want to do a full-drive backup or a partition backup. Would you want to have swappable drives, a permanent back-up drive, or something you can just plug into a USB/serial port?

There are pro's and cons to both approaches. A full-drive backup is generally easier and it's also simpler to reinstall files that you need to replace. However it's slower and, in the event that your primary HD fails, it can make it harder to rebuild all of your original partitions.
The reverse is true of partition backups. Much easier to rebuild a HD from scratch and it's far quicker but you do need to perform a backup in a less casual manner. You'll also need to invest in some additional software to do the trick for you.

In an ideal world, your HD should already be partitioned to make it easy to perform backups. Mine consists of a RAID system so it's being backed up all the time plus I've split the operating system, program files, data files, and surplus/swap filespace into separate partitions. That makes it easy for me to copy all my data files onto a USB pluggable HD simply by using the MSDOS COPY command :D
If one of my 80GB HD's fails the system will automatically switch to the other and I can replace it - plus I have each partition stored onto a removable HD in the event that my software configuration is screwed up by other means.

I'll give some thought to a tutorial though - although it might have to take second place to a few other things I'm doing right now. Work being one of them :yikes:

[TheOldhamWhisper]

If you have XP and a CD writer, you can use Backup from the system tools section to create a set of rescue disks to fully restore your system. This however takes quite a bit of time and is only as up to date as your last backup.

My personal advice - get a hard drive that is at least as big as your current drive and mirror them. Depending on what software you use, you should be able to use the remaining space to store 'non critical' data (stuff you wouldn't care if you lost). The main data though will be intact in the event of failures.

[GlosRFC]

Trust me to open my mouth...the one thing I forgot to do was take a copy of the CMOS settings. And lo and behold, my CMOS managed to get royally messed up on Friday to the extent that it insisted I no longer had a RAID setup :D

Taken the best part of 3 days to resolve, much hair-tugging, the revelation that the firm who sold me this PC went belly-up a couple of months ago, remapping 12 physical drives to 12 completely different logical ones, but finally....I'm back in the land of the connected. Time now to redo my HD backups AND physically write down all the CMOS settings to keep with them!!