My brother swears by off-site back up services. For a small monthly fee, you back up your files via the internet.

I use a portable HD (two actually) and mirror the contents of My Documents to each. Because of the amount of video content I'm archiving, things fill up pretty fast. On older drive I did nothing more sophisticated than a 'copy and paste' to get the files to the ext. drive.

On my newer drive, I'm using this free tool from Microsoft called SyncToy. You can find it here: SynchToy

Professional HD recovery is not practical for home users, but I found a decent recovery tool that was less than $100 and it worked pretty good for me in the past. File Scavenger can sometime get files if the HD failure was a boot sector failure.

 

Dave, if your computer came pre-loaded with Windows XP then you will have to manually install the backup program from your os disks that came with the computer. You can go to Microsoft's site for directions which are fairly simple to follow. I had to do it and it was relatively simple. Once you install the backup program, then its only a click or two for the backup.

 

Dave, check out SyncToy it works well.

 

Colin, Thanks. That's cool. I had to download NET Framework 2.0 Redist Pack (x86) before SyncToy v1.4 would install but SyncToy directed me right to it.

For starters I used 'Echo' and sent everything (My Documents) as one folder to the external HD. Considering it was everything - doc, pict, videos - it did not take long.

Wondering out loud: I wonder if I can 'sync' my bookmarks from IE and Firefox? That's something I've wanted to do for a long time.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

The latest version of Mac OS X has "Time Machine" which is a backup utility that keeps copies of changes automatically to an external hard drive. I haven't set it up yet as I have been backing up all my data to DVD.