Backing up

[Michael Israel]

I always back up my data files to a zip drive.
I plan on attempting to install Win SP2 at some point (after a couple of
install failures). Prior to doing this I want to back up necessary files
that I don't routinely back up. Which files are essential to back up so I
am not devastated by a major failure in Windows? Backing up the entire C
drive seems ludicrous. I'm using XP pro.

 

[zag]

Mike -
Disk spece is pretty cheap nowadays. I back-up my entire
hard drive to a bootable clone weekly with Norton Ghost.
It's proven invaluable several times.
z ------------------------------------------------------

 

[Darrell S]

Not ludicrous at all. Smart, I'd say. (to back up your entire C drive)
You obviously have XP or you wouldn't be in this newsgroup so you have USB
capability. You can get an external USB drive of at least 40 GB well under
$100 these days. (about the price of your Zip drive which only holds 100
MB). Assuming you have USB 2.0 computer capability you could back up your
entire C drive to USB external in about a half hour. I have mine plugged
into a surge protector with an on/off switch. I keep it unpowered to
protect my backup and only power it up when I wish to use it.

I even got DriveImage 7.0 and back up an image of my hard drive. My
computer is set to boot first to any bootable CD that is in my computer. If
something really bad happened and I couldn't get to my hard drive to run a
recovery program I can put my DI 7.0 CD in the drive and bootup. It will
boot from that CD and it has the capability to go to my USB external drive
and re-write the saved image to the C drive.