Complete backup

[Pwnbroker]

What is the best situation for backup up my entire hard drive? I have 2 250GB Sata II drives in Raid 0, so it's obvious that DVDs won't cut it. Do I want to do a complete drive image, or is it more practical to just back up the files/heirarchy? I want to use a usb hard drive, so should I get a 500 GB drive or would a smaller drive suit my needs? Would you recommend a better solution? Also, is Vista's backup good enough or should I go 3rd party? I want simplicity and reliability.

 

[jkresh]

Do you want a backup that allows you to easily restore a file if you accidentally delete it or it is corrupted or are you worried about drive failure? If you want to completely restore your system after a drive failure then something like acronis true image (with a 500gig external drive) would be the way to go, a single image of you array even if full will take considerably less then 500gigs and you can just image partitions/folders if you want (and you can restore anywhere from 1 file to the whole thing which you cant do with vista ultimates imaging program) but I would go for a 500gig one anyway so you can keep multiple images.

 

[Pwnbroker]

That sounds like what I need to do. Althought it'd be nice to be able to restore a few files, I would most likely only use it to restore the whole hard drive, with maybe a separate backup of pertinent files.