Okay sharp computer geeks, Tell me how and the best ways to mirror a harddrive. If i put another harddrive in my computer and mirror from the one i use if the one I am using blows up will the other boot and have everything the other did if I made it the master and took the blewup one out. Whats the best backup methods? Tape backups? Cdwriter backups? Mirror harddrive?.

Hello- What you are asking about is a method called RAID Mirroring. RAID is a way to take multiple harddrives and arrange them in a way to either gain speed (not your case) or data stability. You need to have a motherboard that is RAID enabled. From insdie your OS it seems as if you simply have 1 harddrive but in reality you have 2, in which data is exactly identical on both hard drives and if one suffers from hardware failure, you simply put another one in it's place and run the recover program and it mirrors everything over and you reboot as if nothing has even happened. Tape backups are great for insanely large amounts of data but CDwriting is cheaper and is recommended unless you are needing to back up files larger then will fit on cd. Mirroring the hard drive is probably one of the safest ways to backup your data automatically cause you are saved up until the very millisecond one hard drive goes down. hth and get back to me if you need more info (by email) -Ryan

I use Norton Ghost and PowerQuest Drive Image to create an image of the partitions containing my operating system and programs about once a month. I do not backup my data with these programs. I use CDR media for all backups. Then, I use Stomp Inc.'s BackupMyPC and Easy CD creator to backup the data partition. That way, the program backups are fairly close to current at all times since they seldom change, and the data is up to date all the time. In the event of a crash ( I have suffered three of them over the last few months), it takes less than an hour to be back in business again. Usually, I do not lose data because crashes are usually confined to the drive with the operating system but one of my crashes was due to failure of a fairly new IBM hard drive and everything was damaged in that one. After replacing the drive, it was a simple matter to restore all programs and data.