Best way to back up a hard drive?

[DavidNW]

Hello, everyone.

I would like to back-up the entire content of my hard drive, so that I could easily reinstalled everything in the event of loss of data.

Could you please advise me as to the most reliable & cost-effective way of doing this?

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition, and understand that it can do this, but I'm not sure how to go about it. or indeed, how reliable it is.

Any suggestions, as always, will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Dave.

 

[Addis]

If you want to do routine backups then it'll be wise to use a backup tool dedicated to do that.

Or you can use a ghosting toolt to make an image of your HD so it can be restored when needed.

 

[megamaced]

There are several ways you can do this:

1)Buy a second internal hard drive, and copy all the contents over.
-relatively cheap
-fast data transfer

2)Buy an external USB hard drive, and copy all the contents over
-slight more expensive
-slower speeds
-better portability

3)Use a program such as Norton's Ghost. It takes a snapshot of your hard drive, and can copy it to another hard drive, DVD, or whatever.
-Quick and easy to restore your backup
-Any inperfections you have in your current Windows setup, will be copied over when you restore it!

4)Back up all your data manually on CDs/DVDS
-The most time consuming
-Cheapest option