What is the easiest way to back up a large full hard drive?

[BentValve]

I have my 120gb Seagate nearing its capacity and Id never want to have to re-install everything unless there was no other choice.

I need to start backing the hard drive up every once in awhile..id have to go buy another hard drive or I can transfer the files to my back-up PC.

Sadly I have never put any effort into learning how to do this sort of thing so I am pretty much a newb when it comes to this sort of thing.

 

[Davegod]

Norton Ghost can make an exact image of the entire drive, or individual partitions, which you can then restore perfectly onto another hardrive.

Literally, you could buy a replacement harddrive, physically install it on your PC and be up and running again exactly as before very very quickly.

I'm not sure how it would go for restoring an image of the OS partition onto a backup PC however, since the hardware would be different to the setup of the OS on the image. It can be done, just not so straightforward.


either way, I'd be thinking about saving the backups on another hard drive - even if you got 50% compression you'd be looking at roughly 12 full DVD's.

 

[CraigRT]

using a router or hub/switch? you can just fileshare, and send much of the stuff to the backup PC, 4 PC network at my place, 1 for backup of everything. (and my DVD burner)

 

[aixenv]

ghost if you have it, otherwise do what craig said

and if you dont want to backup everything you definitely need to do a full drive backup to get the windows registry,etc otherwise the apps wouldnt be in the registry