Hi
Bit of a novice question really but...
How do you go about backing up your hard drive, or important files.
What's a good program to use?
Do i need to purchase a zip/tape drive or similar or are a few cd-rw's ok?

thanks

The 'first class' road to backup is adding a second hard drive. Hard drives are more reliable than CDR/RWs and Zip/tape drives.

It also depends on your backups. If you want to backup your entire drive, a program like Norton Ghost or Powerquest Drive Image work best. If you want to choose specific files to back up, you need a program like Veritas BackupmyPC.

What media you select depends on how you want to back up. A harddrive is fastest and will store several backups. It will also allow you to drag and drop individual files. The only problem is that a lightning strike, water leak or fire can take out both drives.

You could use an external usb harddrive enclosure that is not kept connected to your machine.

A tape drive works well because you could make 2 or 3 sets (of one or two tapes) and then rotate them, recording over the oldest so you always have a good restore point.

CD's are okay, but it can take a lot of them to do a backup. This means you have to sit there and put in blank cd's. My opinion is that there is more chance for data error in cd backups.