Help me find a backup solution

[bandXtrb]

I want to find a good way to backup my personal data.

My main drive is an 80GB Maxtor with 19 Gigs of data to backup. I have access to a 30 gig drive on a networked computer, and I have a new 80GB drive in the box. My system is RAID capable and I am running Win2k.

If I install the 80GB drive, should I keep it unplugged, and only plug it in during a backup so that my data would be safe from a nasty virus? If I continue to use the networked 30gb drive, it may also be possibly exposed to a virus since the system is on and connected all the time. If I mirror RAID the 80GBs or use the network drive, I will be safe from physical failure, but is there still a small chance of losing everything, right?

Also, what I don't have is any backup software. I had been using Explorer copy and paste to copy my data, deleting the previous backup, and copying the current one (once I accidentally deleted my current data instead of the old backup, and lost a month of work). I have many files that don't change much such as mp3s. If i must backup manually, I usually only end up doing it once a month.

 

[ISAslot]

I suggest an drive imaging software such as Norton Ghost.

 

[ChefJoe]

I think the fallacy of your suggestion is that you want to back-up gigs of mp3s. Without that, it's likely your backup load would be on the order of a few gigs.

Keep a good AV software program installed, don't use outlook express, and keep up with windows security fixes and you should be just fine with backing up to a portion of a separate ide drive. You could probably even use the windows backup util to do this (scheduled and compressed) and every once in a while (if you wish) winrar-split the image into 650-700 mb chunks and burn to cd-r.