The best thing to do is backup to another HD by cloning your existing drive. You can also create an image of your drive on a hidden partition or removable media. Redundancy is a good thing when it comes to data backup.

Personally, I use Acronis True Image and have been very pleased with the product. It's easy to use, and works very fast.(You can restore an entire drive in under an hour, and depending on the amount of Data, as little as 15 minutes) You can create a hidden partition and use a bootloader to access the image for recovery, just like the big manufactures.

There are others that are free, but Acronis is well worth the $50.

Here's a link to one of articles. It's a walkthrough on using a free backup utility to create a hard drive image.
http://www.techsupportforum.com/content/Hardware/Articles/46.html

 

Also - if you have a Maxtor drive you can get Acronis for free. It's included in MaxBlast.

 

Nice find Nicholas. You can actually download the program as a standalone. It's called Disk Wizard and will work on Seagate and Maxtor drives. It might work on others drives as well, I'll test it out on one of WD drives and post the results back here later on tonight.

Disk Wizard Tutorial

 

Nicer find Matt. :smile: I didn't know you could get a standalone download.

 

Thanks Nicholas, I wouldn't have found it without your link Bro.ray:

Awesome I have a seagate!

I think you'll be very pleased with Acronis, errr Disk Wizard.:grin:

Here's a link to one of articles. It's a walkthrough on using a free backup utility to create a hard drive image.
http://www.techsupportforum.com/content/Hardware/Articles/46.html

You could also use something like Driveimage XML, which is free. Download link and instructions here.

BMR777

BMR, for future reference, the link that I posted above is TSFs tutorial for Driveimage XML. It can be found in our articles section.:wink:

Tumbleweed, does XXClone allow you to do file backup and incremental backup, or is it strictly a cloning tool? Just curious because I've never used the program.

 

Awesome I have a seagate!

 

I use XXClone which is an excellent Free program.

 

You could also use something like Driveimage XML, which is free. Download link and instructions here.

BMR777