I got a note from Morten, in Denmark: "I also take a lot of pride in keeping my systems in good shape. In these days our family rely a lot on our PC's, reading mail, searching the web, home banking and so on. But in the field of backup, I'm not sure if I'm covered good enough.Is it possible, that You could use this opportunity to describe Your backup-setup?"

There are three main components. First, my system automatically backs up my entire "My Documents" folder (including all subfolders) every night. The archive files are zip-compressed, and stored off the main partition. This first-level backup gives me, in effect, one complete data restore point every 24 hours. Even if the OS completely dies; and even if the entire main partition gets trashed, I have all the data safe on another partition.

Second, every now and then (it used to be every day), I'll burn these files to a CD or DVD and store the disk away from the PC. When I've burned enough disks, I'll store them offsite in a rented storage locker. That way, even if my PC were lost to fire, flood, theft, or whatnot, my offsite backups still would be safe.

(Kind of a 2a step: I also keep working copies on my laptop of most everything I'm currently using and working on. It's not a formal backup, but it can serve much the same purpose.)

Third, from time to time (especially before and after major system work), I'll use a disk-imaging tool that creates a byte-for-byte, sector-for-sector copy of my hard drive; or at least the partition that changed. In the event of a major problem, I can restore the disk image, rolling the system back to the exact setup it was in at the time the image was made. Then, I'd use the daily backups to restore my data to the most-current state.

This time, I didn't want to use my older disk images to restore my setup to the new hard drive. In part, this was because that setup had been used and reused for 4+ years; I had software on there that was becoming obsolete (eg Office 2000), and my work situation is now very different from what it was. It was getting to be time for a clean start anyway, and the dead hard drive simply forced the issue. Plus, XP SP3 is out, so starting with a factory-fresh install of XP, and immediately moving to SP3 gave me a cleaner setup than slapping SP3 on top of a 4+ year-old install.

I've made disk images of the clean setup so I can get back to *this* point in the future, if/when I need to. Later today, I should be able to start pouring the data back into the new setup, and then (at last) I'll have a fresh, clean, perfect setup, and can move forward.

I'm still trying to work out a good backup routine for my live-on-disk photos and videos, which consume about 60 GB of disk and are too unwieldy for convenient handling. I'll most likely end up with some kind of separate, incremental backup strategy there. In the meanwhile, I'm using a basic brute-force backup for photos and videos: keeping two copies of everything on separate physical hard drives; plus a third copy on DVD.

Doing good backups is a pain, but if you have stuff on your PC you can't easily replace (banking/tax info; one-of-a-kind photos, videos or music; valuable written documents' email records, etc.), you really gotta do it.

Sooner or later, you *will* have a hardware or software problem that leads to one of those "oh, sh*t" moments when you realize you just may have lost access to your hard drive. It's not a good feeling.

Backups make it hurt less. :-)