Very sound advice, been there. Unfortunately over time I've become complacent and don't back up as often as I should.
Oh well time to fire up the back up software and DVD burner before it's too late!

Already 40% done! Thanks Sir Koop!

Good advise.. but to back up my 120gig "achived files drive" would take a heap of CD's.
It's always a good practice to have as many hard drives as your system allows.
If my second hard drive were to fail.. omg... the sobbing would be intense, but I don't have any other options.

In my small home office of 4 computers I have a 5th one that I use strictly as a network drive. This computer has 2 SATA drives at 250 Gigabytes each for a total storage space of 500 Gigabytes. I have scheduled backups on the first 4 computers to back up at the end of each day to the network drive. (I've set it up so that 2 separate copies are made, one on each drive. (redundancy is important)

I had daily redundancy backups [to separate HDs] and a weekly Drive Image to a second HD with redundancy to a third....but losing my system to a mobo/cpu 'death' meant it was next to useless until the hardware was replaced......

Didn't lose one iota of data though....

I bought a third drive and made a ghost image, which I update monthly combined with CD and DVD backups between new ghost image creations.

Works real well, and I'm up and running in about 15 minutes if master drive goes down. If the mobo goes, well that is another story all together.

I did have to cough up the dough for the third drive and ghost though.

I must admit that I never backed up anything, and in my 20 years of computing history, I've never experienced a hard drive crash. Had CPU burned, had power supply fried, but always managed to get my data back from my hard drive... I guess it's just a matter of time though, but I don't have a DVD burner and it would be a lot too tedious to burn 40 CD's to back up everything...

I'm learning how to play the violin in public again. I have a DVD burner. What files should I back up? Just Docs and Pics? Can I save EVERYTHING?

Can I save EVERYTHING?

It depends on what you need. You could just save your personal files and settings and reinstall everything when it goes away, or you could backup everything and just do full recovery.

It depends on what you use too. If you has 100 GB hard drive that's 40% full, you would have to use about 4 to 5 DVDs to do a full backup. Meanwhile personal file backup could be simply a single DVD or 2.

Also if you do a system image using Norton Ghost, Drive Image or Acronis True-Image, or whichever utility, turn off.. Page Files, Hybernation Files, System restore and clean your Temps, IE Cache, FireFox Cache and clean up any *.chk, *.bak, *.tmp files. This will drastically help reduce back up Image Sizes.

#3 by JourneyMan Phoon If my second hard drive were to fail.. omg... the sobbing would be intense, but I don't have any other options.

heh the sobbing indeed I was totally gutted when it happened to me, went through alot of kleenex. It was just before the GUIO judging started when my HDD went monkeys, lost oh god I honestly cant remember but it must have been 500+ psd's worth of icons and designs over 4-6 months vf- slaps self to never do that again. Dam cold sweats when I heard the lovely clunking/clicking sound that night and it failed to boot and even detect. I swear I was going to be seriously ill.

So glad I keep hold of CD-RW/DVD-RW's these days, I backup weekly since then or as soon as I have something so crucial, its just insane to not back up with this stuff or anything so important to you.

Larry will remember that time, it was utter hell for me when it happened.
PSD's are the preciousss. We musnt let it happenses again no we musnt!

Thank you, XX. Thank you CygnusXII.

Please note the following information is for advanced pc operators.

Best backup procedure I have developed as follows;

1. Install a second harddrive (IDE-Serial) into your system.
2. Purchase CasperXP $50 US @ Link
3. Enjoy creating complete drive copys while browsing your favorite website such as Link
Complete drive copys take around 20 minutes for approximately 40-50 Gb of data.

Drive Failure;
1. Reboot into the bios, and set the boot drive to the drive you used for the drive copy.
2. Restart and load Windows as though nothing had happened... you will be useing the backup harddrive to do this
3. Run CasperXP again and bump (copy) your backup drive to your primary drive
4. Restart into bios and reset boot drive to primary and restart.

This is the best way I have found to do the bump as i call it lol
And yeah 2 minutes later im back and running if a virus manages to get through (rare nowdays), or the harddrive crashes.. (not so rare!) Had two die in 7 years, a third went south and decided to live there..lol

As a footnote CasperXP has a automated backup configuration panel for those who want to set and forget.

Hope this can be of use to many.