What's a good way to backup my WinXP OS?

[stm177]

I had a hard disk crash about two weeks ago, so I bought two new 80 GB drives.

I reinstalled everything, but I'd like to make a backup of my current installation so I have a good place to go back to.

I've heard about "ghost" programs but I don't know what I'd need for that.

I have a 52x DVD internal disk writer in my computer.

I think my motherboard can do raid 1-0(?), but I've never used anything like that before. Besides, I want an installation I can go back to, if things get messed up. Like say a virus, or a bad driver install, or a really horrible program that messes up my registry.

My current disk usage is about 8-9 gb on C: for Windows XP with patches installed.

[Zeb The Troll]

Two things.

1.) It's not a "ghost" program. It's Norton Ghost and it's a pretty good tool for imaging your system. I'm pretty sure that image will fit onto a DVD just fine.

2.) For what you're describing, Windows XP has a roll back feature built in and it works pretty well called System Restore.

[The Valiant Turtle]

As far as backing up WinXP, system restore does it well enough. The only drawback is that there aren't any ways that I know to burn a restore point to DVD or anything similar.

However, my advice would be to focus on making sure your data is backed up, you can always re-install the operating system, you can't always re-create your documents, pictures and so-forth. Try to get in the habit of backing up your important documents to DVD or something similar every few months (or more!)

If your motherboard supports RAID-1 I would recommend using it. It provides excellent protection from hard drive failure. Of course, you lose all the space on one of your hard-drives since it just mirrors the other drive.

[adanedhel9]

However, my advice would be to focus on making sure your data is backed up, you can always re-install the operating system, you can't always re-create your documents, pictures and so-forth. Try to get in the habit of backing up your important documents to DVD or something similar every few months (or more!)

If backing up your documents from your Windows system is your goal, Mozy (http://www.mozy.com) is an excellent way to go. Set it up once, and it backs up your documents automatically to Mozy's own harddrives. You get 2GB for free (which easily handles all the documents that I care to back up), and un upgrade to unlimited is only $5 a month (which is quite reasonable, I think).