Dirty topic.

[ECA]

OK, the meanest question I know.
HOw long does it take you to recover for a FAILURE of the HD.
IF you had to start from scratch, with windows, How long would it take you to get EVERYthing BACK to normal(almost, or better)
Last time took me 1 week, of updates, upgrades, and finding all my stuff. I got a 56k modem. After updating Office(25), and windows(16), and finding all the drivers, and turning OFF and ON, it was 1 full week.

[flashfire]

about 1 week is right for the few times i've had to start completely over. It doesn't take that long (3 hrs or so) to get back to a basic working configuration w/ windows and office, etc installed. However the work of details like updating patches, finding those obscure programs that use frequently but never burned to disc usually takes a while. We're back to my Ghost thread from before. Get a copy of ghost, burn an image of system drive and store on a DVD if you're so lucky to have a burner already. If not, on a really big 2nd drive. Another Idea is to restore image to a spare drive and set that drive aside. That way if something happens. Just pop in spare drive and off you go. However, if you do have a spare drive and space in case. Always better to set up a drive mirror. I got tired of restoring either from ghost image or pure reinstall and just ponied up the bucks for a 2nd matching drive and mirrored them.

[ECA]

Is it REALLY possible to back up windows and NOT having to Mirror or Copy EVERYTHING....
I dont think so. By the time you copy all the driver, your mail address's, ALL your net fav's, you might as well copy everything else.

[ruri]

My old computer had an IBM GXP75...

Never did fully recover from that one.

My server has a 2nd HD that I mirrored to once every quarter or so. Worst case scenario, I could roll back to the last time it was mirrored by swapping HD.

My current workstation doesn't have that feature... yet...
When the 120GB/8MB WD HD reached about $100, I'll mirror my workstation. In the mean time, I'm crossing my fingers.

[t2k3]

umm you should burn a new setup cd with the updates. Windows 2000 has that feature in the resource kit. It makes a new setup cd with all the drivers and updates in addition.

[Ioman]

My way probably sounds pretty ghetto but I have a list of things to back including cookies, folders, favorites etc. and whenever i need to reformat or feel my computer is about to crash, I copy them to my firewire external drive. I usually back them up once a week or so, but I have been slacking lately. I used to copy those files to a CD-RW before using the external firewire drive. I also used to have two hard drives in my computer to mirror, but I took the second out for another system.

I would say to keep those things important backed up, no need to back up the whole OS and drive.