This isn't just for the originator of this thread, but for every PC user everywhere, who reads this forum.
Many people come to the internet help forums asking "How can I secure this barn door?" when their horse has already escaped. It's a bit late at that point.
Every computer user in the world who knows enough to come to a forum and go thru all the registration and posting rigors, should also know that they need to be making whole system backups on a regular basis.
If not, then I'm right here to tell them that they should!
With XP, a whole-disk backup could be done to a single DVD or large flash drive. An external HD is also a great place to store Drive Images.
With Vista, the job of backing up gets just twice as hard. Twenty gig's or more on the C: drive, with Vista, is common. No longer is a DVD or Flash Drive satisfactory for a Whole System backup.
With every electronics dept. in town selling external USB drives, finding one is getting easier all the time and the prices are coming down too, due to increased competition between manufacturers.
Now for the software to backup your HD. That too is getting easier and easier to find. FREE backup software is available (for FREE) all over the internet.
For Vista, there are several titles that I have tried and know to work very well indeed.
If you have either a Seagate or Maxtor Hard Drive in your system, the FREE software from Seagate in their
"Seagate DiscWizard"
(corrected to comply with info from OldBloak)
package or from Maxtor in their "Max Blast" package works like a champ. Download and install the software on your HD, then use the software to make a Recovery (BOOT) CD.
Then you can delete the original software from your hard drive, to lessen the file load on the HD.
Both Symantec Ghost and Acronis True Image work great, but both are Retail Software. Both the Seagate and Maxtor software is actually the Acronis software, offered for FREE from those companies. The software is easily downloaded from their web sites.
I've been using Ghost 2003 for my system backups for years and it's worked great, but it can't deal with the new format that Vista uses for it's hard drives.
Ghost 11.5 answers this need. I backed up my own Vista HD this morning with Ghost 11.5 and saved the image file to a second internal HD.
Now, if I or some piece of software screws up my Vista drive, a quick Restore of that Backup file, puts everything back in order again.
I've been doing Ghost backups every week for years and have many backup images saved to DVD's. I can open any of those old backup image files with "Ghost Explorer" and recover any file that may have become corrupted or lost.
Keeping your system SAFE by doing regular backups is NOT an expensive or complicated process. What is does require, is a user/operator with the commitment to do backups OFTEN.
Cheers mates! (I hope this helps someone, somewhere to protect their own system)
The Shadow
