Start a backup regimen today.

I use external USB 2.0 hard drives (SATA drives in inexpensive cases) to store backup images. My backup technique uses the software DiskImage2 from O&O Software to produce compressed image backups. It takes a little over an hour to make a backup with verify of a hard drive that has about 30 GBytes of files on it. O&O Image files may be mounted as a disk drive under WinXP to permit individual files and folders to be extracted using your standard file manager. Full image restore is supported through use of a bootable CDRom that understands all the disk formats and runs a self contained copy of Windows that is licensed to the user with the software purchase price.

USB2 drives are fantastic because they offer powered down off-line securuty, portability and also a neat means to support transfer of huge amounts of file data between computers and locations. They also lend themselves excellently to notebook computers where there are often limited ways to interface out of the unit.

Michael Karas