and since,. in less than 24 hours, the used, tested-fine hard drive I installed into the wife's machine went adios muchachos if I recall the Aliens term right- and I'm punting- it's right hard to disagree.

It's officially now a hybrid on life support, sort of a 'pared to the bone' anorexic sp4 with basics installed for that machine's core needs. That won't conflict with rebuilding/restoring from archive the rest of the things that it has to do once in a while as additions from a backup. mirror it now, restore forever.

VIA KT4OO Ultra, Athlon XP 2200+, nVidia GeForce 4 MX440 64mb AGP 8x out VC, 512mb Ram-

...And just 3.6 gigabytes of hdd. which I'm ghosting onto 2 similar drives, to be burned to a DVD. ghost 2001 and freeDOS booted from ubcd 4.11 work fine.

Sorry for not answering sooner, I just remembered this post (oops) and came to see if anybody answered.

I hear you BuBBy, but the flood stuff was just an allegory. I used to work for a National Laboratory where backups were taken very seriously. We had a SUN server which was backed up every day to a tape. I always had at least three copies of the last three days backups at my house and we kept another set somewhere else.

Every morning I took the earliest tape that was in my house to work and every night, when it was time to go home, I would grab a copy of the latest to take home. We had 30 tapes that we recycled around every month and replaced with new ones every year. I know all this because I ended up having to take care of it all when nobody else had a clue on how to do it.

I am not really worried about earthquakes and such because it one actually happened the only thing I would want to save would be my arse, but I do have an external drive that I first need to clean (backup its contents to the data backup) before I implement a safe backup solution :)

Actually I have three external drives, well, make that four but that is not important. The one I want to use is an internal sata drive mounted on a ZDisc external enclosure that can take sata drives and make USB external drives of them (it can also make sata externals too, but my computer has no external sata plugs).

The idea is to clone my HD into this enclosed sata drive once a month and keep that separate from data backups which will be done incrementally every day. If some of my data is lost I can replace it with the data backup, but if my hard drive goes boom, I would like to take the external one out of its enclosure and use it to replace the one that went boom and pretend nothing happened.

I still would have to use the data backups to fill the gap created by the very known Moore's law which pretty much ensures that drives do not go kaput on the 1st day of a month.

Hence my dilemma, but it looks like goodgotd has given me all the solutions I might need so I want to thank both of you for taking the time to answer me and being so nice about it.

AxCut

Info on disc cloning alternatives from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning

for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista DriveImage XML is a free option.

boot-to-freedos, Partition Saving is available.

another is SelfImage, worth a look.

Free OpenSource Ghost appears to be just starting, but bears watching.

Clonezilla looks right handy.

And BuBBy already knows all about Trinity Rescue Kit.

I've often considered putting my backup machine in my fireproof safe out in the stone and concrete shop, backing up via ethernet, personally. It doesn't have to only hold guns.

it would also keep the safe warm and dry.

in between partition images, regular multi-generation differential backups work.

Hmm. Backing up to protect against Theft, Fire, Flood, Hurricane.... It's a good idea in principle, but...

How & Where were you planning on keeping this backup drive stored?

(I've had clients who backed up their system carefully every evening, and each morning the "disks" were stored in a plastic disk box next to the computer. The idea would work fine until there was a Theft, Fire, Flood, Hurricane).

There is no point spending more money to backup data than it is worth to you.

Have you considered external or removable hard drives - stored in a fireproof safe/box away from the computer? Sometimes a complicated software solution is chosen without considering a simple hardware based solution.

I've always backed up data. The OS and Applications can be reinstalled and stuff from original media/downloads. After a crash or other data-loss incident, the only stuff I really cared about getting back was the data. Usually the zip style backups were ideal for me. Took a little longer to identify what needed to be backed up - but I became a lot more familiar with my applications and systems in the process.

I am sorry if this is a bit sketchy, but I need to go to sleep after being awake for 30 hours

I have an HP desktop with two partitions. One is the C:/ directory and the other is the HP windows recovery partition in D:/. I also have an external One Touch USB Maxtor that is as big as my desktop HD, so in theory that should be enough room right? My current disk alway has at least 40GB of free space.

I am worried about losing my entire drive contents due to tragedies like theft, HD malfunction, floods, Hurricanes, ... that kind of thing.

Ideally, I would like a program that could clone (is this the same as sector copying?) the disk in its entirety and if tragedy strikes (see above), I could replace the disk (HP has me covered for another year of Warranty). Use either a thumb drive, a rescue disk, running the shell from an installation disk (M$ sent me a new one because live OneCare started asking for the disk), or whatever process which would allow me to run a command that would then transplant the clone to the new and shiny HD.

The result of this process (again ideally) would then be a desktop that would run like the one I was not destined to keep and thus sleep easy every night knowing that the lost of about 20 years worth of work is not going to happen again (I still have nightmares).

To be fair, I was backing up important files, but I had accounts at two Universities, at LANL all in some Unix form or other that were backed up and hidden. The disks were subsequently found by the thieves and stolen as well (inside job for sure).

When I say run like the lost one I mean that exactly. Same registry, same software, same everything. I mean, literally as in I can laugh at the face of the tragedy (see above) and pretend it never happen at all.

Can EASUS Data Recovery do this? I am not sure how, if the disk goes, the program goes with it and even though it is stored in the clone it can not be ran from there.

I cannot afford Ghost (The all encompassing leader in Clone making) and I don't use pirated software. I have Keriver, Drive Image XML, today's GAOTD, Paragon's DC 8.0, Titan, PC Tool's File Recover, Backup4All 3, DoubleSafety, EasTec Backup 2007, Recuva, Maxtor's recovery, and probably more (like NTBackup, Blah).

I also have flash drives, a 60 Gig WD Passport (The desktop and the backup Disks can store 160 Gigs), DVD writer, Tons of DVD+R,-R,RW,CD-R,RW and a strange sense of urgency (SMART says the disk is fine, but my hunches are usually on the spot. Also the noise the PC has started making but it is not in the HD.)

The problem is, I am not going to be my worse enemy by testing different approaches. How do I know that whatever I do will work?

I know about shadow copies (a wee bit I'm afraid), basic backup procedures like keeping copies in separate locations and all that. After working at LANL for 10 years one thing I learned is security. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I don't have their resources.

I know about Virtual Machines, like VMWare about M$ change of hardware policies and about BART PDE and specially about being terrified at the prospect of losing all my GAOTD's Specially the games :)

Seriously, I need guidance. One thing I hate is playing Guinea pig AFTER the crash has occurred. Also be gentle, knowing about things is not the same knowing the things themselves.

Again, parts of this post may not be polished, but it is the best I can do now.

AxCut, your favorite choice for self dismemberment.