Juan Alvarez wrote:

> unfortunally my HDD crashed and all my soft and everything went back
> to the eternall kosmos!

  There's a lesson there.  Can I recommend what is at least in this
country and AFAIK, the US, the absolute *fastest*, cheapest, easiest and
therefore most-likely-to-be-*actually*-done form of backup?

  Buy a second HDD at least as big as the first (it works here that if
you have just bought a new HDD a few weeks ago, and obviously you have,
it is now cheaper than when you bought it or a bigger one is now the
same price).  Buy a removable drive bay - less than $20 here, fit the
second HDD in it and the bay in a 5" hole.

  Weekly or twice weekly, and not whilst it is raining, insert the
backup drive into the bay, switch on (note the order!), go to Explorer,
highlight your first drive in the left pane, de-expand it, select:
"Edit->Select All" then drag the marked stuff in the right pane onto the
backup drive in the left.

  A query will appear, answer "Yes to All" and in a couple of minutes
(or less!) it's done.  Shut down, remove the backup drive, re-start and
do a Defrag (courtesy of the team that *know* how to write software:
Norton).

  Notes:
 1} Tape backup is obsolete.  Even if you could hack the procedure and
the programs, it's been cost-ineffective for a fair while now at the PC
level.

 2} CD writers presently cost more than the HDD, and the procedure is
still dreadful.  It is the *proper* way though.  Maybe using incremental
backups using Linux though, it could be batched properly ...

 3} Yes, there is a remote danger of a crash during the single-copy
backup procedure.  But it's *much* better than nothing!

 4} Affordability?  Can you afford this (crash) to happen again?

 5} If you have a network, you've already got the second drive.  Write
some batch files.

 6} All current BIOS appear to auto-probe the HDDs so that doesn't slow
you down.  It's hard to explain, except in terms of the overall PC
phenomenon, why this wasn't the default ten years ago.

 10} To my humour-challenged critics, "OK, I'm at it again.  Tough!"
  (:-b)
--
  Cheers,
        Paul B.