[Glenn]

Use a "ghost" program and a USB drive. I won't suggest a program because that would start an argument, but google the terms "ghost backup" and you'll find what you need. I use a 400gb USB drive and partition it for 3 different OSes.

[dinodino]

Use Acronis TrueImage with a hard drive in an external USB enclosure. You can make a full image of the drive. I find that Acronis works better than Norton. You can buy and download TrueImage for $50 at http://www.acronis.com .

[Riley]

Norton Ghost will image the whole drive. You'll need to create a Ghost boot disk and have something to back it up onto- say a second drive that is slaved into the system and is of equal or larger size.

[delacoert]

Radified Guide to Norton Ghost (Symantec) - A Tutorial on How to Create, Save & Restore Hard Drive Back-up Ghost Images

[azhenfud]

GHOST

[longjack]

Windows OS ?

Acronis True Image

Advantages of True Image include backups of live data from within windows. It can be scheduled to do backups in the background.

If your OS gets hosed, boot with an Acronis CD and point it to your backup for a restore. I have a 6 GB OS (Win 2000) which Acronis can wipe and rewrite in under 10 minutes.

Norton Ghost

is another common backup app

HTH

[Lokibob]

bump

[Jaxter]

Bump!

[KoRn]

Ghost works well for an entire system backup. If you are only interested in backing up files, go to start>run and type ntbackup .

[LSU Engineer]

I agree with the recommendation above for Acronis True Image. I have the same configuration you do - two hard drives in each PC. One is 'active', one is mainly for backup. True Image backs up the active drive automatically every night, and I periodically make a separate backup to DVD disks. Twice I've had system crashes and had to restore the system from the backups. Both times it worked flawlessly.

p.s. - I tried Norton Ghost and didn't care for it.

[BubbaHeel]

Purchase as many harddrives as possible - if you have two computers, then two harddrives in each computer gives you as many as four local copies of your data [assuming that you go to the bother of copying your data to each of the drives], and you can get very large harddrives for next to nothing [e.g. it looks like there are 40GB harddrives out there for $29.99, 80GB for $35, etc etc etc]:

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard%5Fdrives/

However, local copies of your data do you no good if e.g. a criminal steals both of your computers, or if your house burns to the ground, or if Hurricane Katrina pays a visit to your neighborhood.

For that, you need REMOTE copies of your data, and there I'd recommend purchasing a domain name [about $10 per year] and a webhosting plan [$5 -$10 per month], and uploading copies of your really important files to your website as often as once a day.

For instance, you can use FTP scripts in conjunction with the "-s" option & the Task Scheduler so as to fully automate an FTP upload [although if there are any really sensitive files involved, you should be aware that FTP does NOT encrypt passwords and does NOT encrypt files, so that super-sensitive files should be sent via a fully encrypted protocol, such as SFTP]:

Using FTP Batch Scripts
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/96269

Managing Scheduled Tasks
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/guide/sas_man_lpja.mspx

For instance, suppose you put something like the following commands in a file called "C:\MYFTPSCRIPT.FTP":

open FTP.MYDOMAIN.COM
REMOTEUSERNAME
REMOTEPASSWORD
verbose
binary
lcd "C:\Documents and Settings\LOCALUSERNAME\My Documents"
mput *
quit

and suppose you set the scheduler to run the following program every night at midnight:

ftp.exe -s C:\MYFTPSCRIPT.FTP

Then every night, at midnight, the scheduler would upload all of the files in your "My Documents" to the FTP side of your web server.

There are all sorts of variations you can play on this theme [the UNIX guys like to fiddle around with something called TAR, and "TARBALL" all the directories into one great big flat file], but you should get the idea.

As for domain name registration, I recommend an outfit called "Domains by Proxy", which anonymizes your purchase of the domain name [that way, the bad guys can't go to "WHOIS" and discover who you are, and learn your home address]:

http://www.domainsbyproxy.com

As for web hosting providers, there are literally GAZILLIONS of them out there; the best forum for learning about them is called "Web Hosting Talk":

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16

Right now I'm using something called HostMonster; another with lots of disk space is DreamHost:

http://www.hostmonster.com

http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html

[Host Monster is based in Utah, so I'm pretty confident that they're GOP-ers. Dreamhost, on the other hand, is in Los Angeles, so who knows?]

Anyway, for about $10 a year in Domain Name registration fees, and about $5-$10 a month in web hosting fees, you can rest easy at night knowing that you've got a remote copy of your data.

[USCG SimTech]

Spend ~$80 and buy 4 PATA or SATA (whichever type of HDDs you are using) removable carriages. Install all 4 drives in these carriages. Take the "Primary Zero" C HDD out of "Machine A" and put it in the "Primary One" D HDD of "Machine B" (paying attention to jumpers on the HDDs as needed). Do a uSoft full backup of the D Drv to the C drv saved as one file. Deselect any large backup image files done at previous times. Reverse machines to back up the C drv of the other. Keep two iterations of backup on each C drv. (You may want to go back a generation of image if something is later found out to be screwed up AFTER your last backup) Delete all other older images.

This is basically how I've kept the USCG Academy's Ship Simulators (6 full mission, ~$9M capital investment) at 99.93% available for training for +15 years. I cheat, though, and have dedicated machines just to RCV the removable carriages from boot disks of all the other 64 machines and have removable 250GB drives in those dedicated backup PCs.

There is always a backup of only "SYSTEM STATE" check box which is the registry and "boot just about everything" of your C Drive also. But ALL the files that would be needed to do a 100% boot are not backed up.

[RichardW]

I recently updated both hard drives in my two new Dell computers. I did a mirror imaging of both with the included software included with the new drives. Worked perfectly. I took out the old hard drives and put them into my bedroom dresser drawer for that rainy day. I use a flash drive to save my data files. The new hard drives booted up normally and have worked fine for the past three months. Piece of cake.

I only keep one hard drive in my computers and have a single connection cable in order to improve the air flow since each are the IDE cables. The new SATA drives wouldn't be a problem. And it also puts less strain on the power supply.

[Noumenon]

There's backup and then there's backup. Check out my website for a discussion and some ideas that you may find useful.