Oh no! It's a disaster...

3 days ago I suffered a disk crash while working to get a RSS feed to my blog.

I make an habit of copying the important stuff to another computer I use regularly.
Of course. But still it's a pain to restore and install all the software you need.

While you can use Symantec Ghost to make an image of your Windows partition,
I am always tweaking and installing software on my computer so it would make
sense to buy an external USB disk so that I can copy my Windows partition.

You can have a 160GB external disk for about $100 wich is plenty for most.
It's a good idea to take a backup every week.

I was using Nero backup on DVDs wich is the cheapest way to go. But when you have more
than 60 GB of data like I do, it takes 12 DVDs to backup everything. You better not be in hurry.

So I lost a full day just to restore to my new disk. And then re-install all the utilities or
software I installed in the last few weeks because during the Holidays I didn't take any backups.

One other solution would be to use a mirrored disk. A mirrored disk (or RAID-1) is using two
disks for the same partition. You can have a software mirror, Windows XP handles this, or if you are lucky enough, your motherboard handles this. So, if one disk crashes, you can boot from the other disk and keep working. With the price of hard drives falling every
year, this is the optimal solution for keeping your home business humming and not lose
precious time restoring tons of data.