· Create identical bootable partitions! Copy an existing hard drive onto a new hard drive!

· Though not as powerful and flexible as “Drive Image” or “Ghost” drive imaging programs, the simplicity, yet powerful capabilities of DrvClonerXP make it the favorite choice for many.
  
Since you too had ordered Norton Ghosts or Acronis… do instead  take advantage of it and Image the entire drive then back up data daily. If you add or remove applications go ahead and re-image the entire drive, The best time to image the drive is immediately after everything is installed and all personal preferences are set for each program–that is assuming a home or office type computer. Don’t forget to create a restore point on the computer as well before you back up  the whole hard drive. I back up 2 computers on my one large  external plug and play hard drive.
  
“I think the most convenient and nearly the safest place for a backup image of your system hard drive is on an external hard drive left unconnected and electrically off unless it is being used to backup the system file, or being used to reconstitute the system file from a stored image. This keeps the chances of losing the external hard drive and the system drive at the same time to a minimum. For extra insurance, do still also make DVD disc backups of the backup image, and store them in a different place. That gives you the ultimate protection from a system catastrophe. I use Acronis True Image for my backup, and it runs very efficiently on my Vista and XP computers, system. The boot disc generated by the program, allows easy emergency access to external hard drives connected by USB.”

The best forms of backup are automatic, because people make errors, and contrary to popular belief, computers do not.  Programs like Norton Ghost, Acronis, etc do  create periodic copies of files onto external drives and other medium—you can set them up so that when you’re sleeping, your computer is copying your important pictures, documents, and whatever else you need onto your external drive.  If your internal hard disk fails, at least you can simply install a new hard drive, and your files are waiting for you on your external. But still do keep a copy of your important files on a DVD disk in case something goes wrong. You can    use Syncback  http://www.2brightsparks.com/assets/software/SyncBack_Setup.zip     (which is free, but SyncBackPro is not) to do your backups.  For CD or DVD use the writer of your choice. Most people seem to  use Nero. Syncback and nero will copy whatever you want to have copied, but a copy of the operating system and programs will not work. They must be installed unless you use one of the separate drive imaging programs. Make sure they also copy all of your data and not just the programs.
  
When to backup – manually at least about once a week. Daily automatically, it takes about 2 hours or more.
  
Internal Backup, One Disk approach. For an existing  particularly large hard drive, the hard disk can be partitioned so that one partition may be used as a repository of backup data. For this type of backup, you can use automatic backup software, which will do the needed daily backups of data you have specified or a full backup of your active partitions. You can also manually copy your essential  files from your active drive partition to your backup drive partition as long as you do this regularly. This is one of the least advisable forms of backup out there, because the backup partition becomes as useless as the main partition if your hard drive ever crashes. And one day it will. With only an internal hard drive when the data is corrupted or the OS corrupted, both drives corrupted. 
  
” I had 2 hard drives in my system and was backing up data files from one to the other thinking that the chances of both drives failing at the same time would be astronomical. Then the power supply failed and when I installed a new one both drives would not boot. Apparently the power supply put out too much voltage that zapped the circuit board on both drives. I’m backing up to an external hard drive now “.
  
Internal or external Backup, Multiple Disks approach. You can also set up another hard drive for backup within or preferably an external, removeable, plug and play hard drive to your computer. With only an internal hard drive when the data is corrupted or the OS corrupted, both drives corrupted.
  
This second removable external hard drive is a separate entity from your first, active hard drive, so it presents greater protection and data security in the likely case your active hard drive is corrupted. 
 
In both of these these case you can use a software PROGRAM  to create a mirror image of one hard drive on the other hard drive automatically or manually. The advantage of the manual disconnect APPROACH is that your data is completely safe if you suffer a hard drive crash, and this will  protect you from a virus or spyware secondary infection, as the infection will not be written to the separate backup drive right along with the good data. A good anti virus program  should help to prevent this or to deal with this.

For very serious work.. “I would strongly recommend that you back up your data. I am a photographer for our church and I am responsible for photographing all programs and activities. About a year and haft ago I switch to a digital camera. Since the hard drive in the computer was not large enough I purchase a Maxtor OneTouch 250 GB USB drive. I had about four thousand pictures on it. The drive was running fine and I was real happy with it. I knew that I needed to back it up and planned on getting another external drive to mirror the data on. One day a couple of months back I was going to download some photos from my camera and when I started the computer and external drive, the Maxtor drive would not power up. The drive was still under warranty and I contacted Maxtor. They sent me a replacement drive. Because some of the pictures were critical to our building program I needed to recover them. I contacted a data recovery company and it cost us $1200 (the data recovery company quoted me $1200 to $3500) to recover the files on the drive. We were fortunate that it was only the electronics that failed and the data was still available on the disks. This was a costly mistake but it could have been worse. There was no warning, one day it was working fine and the next day it didn’t. I strongly recommend that you analyze your data on your computer and if any of it is valuable and irreplaceably then you had better back it up. I now have two external hard drives that I store the data on and I burn a copy onto DVD disk to store in another location just in case a disaster happen to our church. I make two back ups of the data. I decided that I would mirror the hard drives so I could have faster recovery in case one failed. I also made backups on DVD’s.  I buy two different brands of blank DVD’s and make one copy on each of the brands and  then store them in two different locations (miles apart) just in case of a natural disaster.   “ 
  
Firstly I do have a Backup  computer with the same capacity. I  backup of all my important  data on it about once a month  (about 100 GB )  This ensures that even if the main computer  crashes and burns (i.e, the defective power supply kills both drives), I still do have a ”live” electronic copy and back up computer to use.
  
I also do a Backup to DVD. About once per quarter, I  also do make backups onto DVD of important data.
  
I also personally still firstly do like both of the computer’s entire HD backed up. And you can make a good  backup program do what you want it to do. If something happens Next I simply insert the Acronis backed up HD and I am up and running again. With the external portable hard drive I have been backing up from one computer to another as well.

   
One of the most important things you need to remember about backup is that files still do  need to be checked for consistency.  Any file transfer can go poorly and only copy part of your data over, leaving you with a corrupt file that’s now next  virtually useless.  If you use automatic transfer, you still should check your files about once a week or so.  Make a habit of it.  Remember that your files are only safe if  you can actually now also see that they’re safe.