OK, I’ll admit it. In 25 years of computer use I’ve never done a b/u. Yes, I’ve been very lucky. Now I realize the importance after a call from a store that was put out of commission for 2 days thanks to a crash.
I have a 40 GB HDD, running XP Home and have both a CDRW drive and DVD drive. While I know my CDRW drive and discs work, the DVD burner and discs are kinda iffy.
So what’s the best way to do a back-up? Or am I better off relying on the system restore utility?
Your best bet is to just back up important documents and programs that you’ve downloaded which you think may be hard to find again. At the most that’s only going to be one or two CD-Rs…provided you don’t have a big music collection or something. Other than that, you can start clean with freshly formatted harddrive.
As far as system restore, I’ve never had much luck with it. It basically just messes with your windows registry in case you’ve installed fishy software. I’ve found that it’s much like waving a cross at a vampire: It can’t hurt to try, but in the end you’ll probably just have to drive a stake through the heart.
Buy an external hard drive as big or bigger than your internal hard drive. It should connect via your USB port and it will have backup software (well, the better quality ones do). I have several including one of these for one system.
I second the advice by Duckster. My backup drive lives in a fire resistant cabinet, along with all of my install CDs. Using a program called Acronis True Image, I created a copy of the entire HDD-data files, OS, preferences, and all, and now do incremental backups every month. As long as I’ve got the backup HDD, I can start a new machine from zero using those files.