Backup drive - how to

wazza

hiya a novice here so excuse the terminology i use

In my pc my hard drive is 160Gb. Thinking of buying a 300Gb external drive. One thing i want to do is create a ''copy'' of my hard drive. Is this called a backup or a ghost image??? How does one go about creating it. I am lead to believe that if my hard drive dies my backup drive can be inserted into the pc and i can continue without having to reinstall everything.

can i partition the external drive so it is 180/120 Gb. Using the 180Gb part for the backup and the 120Gb for odd jobs

swebb

A number of things you can do... A simple thing I do is store all my files in 'My Documents' (well, nearly all my files). I then burn this onto a DVD every month or so. I usually add photos etc in that folder, so I always have DVD backups of my latest files. You can of course burn to a disk more frequently if needed.

You can now buy 4GB data sticks. Even quicker to copy files than burning to a DVD.

At the end of the day, it depends on how valuable your data is to you. Assume the worst case (you lose the lot) and how you will recover from that point.

woo

i use syncback to copy my files from pc to external hard drive.
if you want to create an image of your drive look at symantec ghost or acronis true image

albertross_2

Buy a copy of Norton Ghost or Acronis Trueimage, does it all for you.

This is the nearest freeware I've found..

http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

Not as good as Ghost though.

melipona

woo wrote:

i use syncback to copy my files from pc to external hard drive.
if you want to create an image of your drive look at symantec ghost or acronis true image

I concur, you can get it from:

http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

simple to use and automate the backup.