Cornell's method is what I'd do if I needed a robust and quick to restore solution--I too prefer "copy" to "backup" for reasons Cornell mentioned.

What I used to do could suit people with 1 PC. Ever since motherboards have supported 2 hard drives, I've always installed my 'old' HD whenever I upgrade a PC. It's usually smaller & slower, but does fine.

I only copy my own data - ie I don't copy programs or Windows. The key to this is putting all your own data in the My Documents folder tree. Whenever I want, I then just open Windows Explorer and drag the MyDocs folder to the old drive and let it copy away.

To make this most effective, make sure you select a MyDocs sub-folder as the 'data folder' for your programs, eg Office, email etc. The only non-MyDocs folders I have to additionally copy are the Windows Favorites and Cookies folders.

If your main drive fails, you'll lose all your Registry settings. In short, you'll have to reformat/replace your main drive and then install Windows and all your programs--plus set up any program preferences you couldn't store under MyDocs.

But at least you'll have all your data, which is the stuff you can't replace from CDs or online. Besides, when I used this method, Win98 was all that was available--and that needed reformatting & reinstalling 3-4 times a year anyway to keep things running well.

In recent years we use Windows2000 and have 4 PCs networked--2 main PCs, 2 old ones. Now just copy MyDocs from 1 main PC to the other whenever, and copy both to one of the old PCs once a month.

I'll probably have to move to Cornell's solution soon though, as the data is becoming more important now and of course my method doesn't cover us off-site for catastrophe like fire.

Btw, an ounce of prevention: invest in an UPS device to protect against problems with your elictricity supply. Those can damage your drives, motherboards or other hardware over time.

Mike.


Atlantic Bridge Publishing