Second back up hard disc

[spx]

Hi I have a laptop running xp and have recently purchased a second hard disc for backup purposes. It conects via usb and everything works ok.

The only thing is I'd like to take a 'snapshot' or exact duplicate of the main disc so if any thing happens I could actually boot up from the new disc drive or at least be able to copy everything back.

I would like to include the entire disc including xp and all emails, programs etc.

How do I do this please?

 

[Igorian]

The ability to boot from a USB drive will depend on your machine.

Probably (IMHO) the best utility to use to create a backup is Norton Ghost. This will allow you to either take an image of the drive, which can be restored using the emergency recovery procedure, or a complete bootable clone.

XP does have builtin backup software, but it's nowhere near as good as Ghost and really used for specific data backups, rather than volume imaging.

 

[JohnD]

You could use XP "Files and Settings Transfer" and copy the stuff onto CDs.

When you have a crash, you will have to re-install XP, but the transfer will copy across all the stuff how you had it before. it is designed for copying stuff off your old PC onto your new one.

Ghost does seem to take a lot of disks. I do an infrequent Ghost and then regular backups of Emails, My Documents and Email onto disks so that I can recover recent data. I know people who use an incremental backup package so it only has to automatically copy the stuff that has changed since the last backup. This is quicker and uses less space each time. However the Restore takes longer.

If you have an extra hard drive you can put your backups onto that which is quicker than CDs. Some apps have a backup facility of their own each time you close them. I do that and swap disk caddies so I only do a CD archive once a month and store it offsite (old pro ).

 

[empip]

Norton Ghost 2003 £9-99 aug 2005 from Amazon 3rd party seller.
Ghost is OS independant.
A good web site for 'how to use it' is... http://ghost.radified.com/
Complete with it's own forum.

 

[Igorian]

Norton Ghost 2003 £9-99 aug 2005 from Amazon 3rd party seller.
Ghost is OS independant.
A good web site for 'how to use it' is... http://ghost.radified.com/
Complete with it's own forum.

I would go for a later version than 2003 (Version 10+). The backup process runs from Windows and is easier to use. The restores can be done by booting from the Ghost CD, which will recognise USB drives.

 

[spx]

Thanks for the info guys I bought N. ghost v10 from Amason.