Hints to help when your computer crashes

[Guilbert]

I often see on this forum (and others) that people say that have had huge
problems when their computer crashes.

Obviously a computer crash is going to cause problems, but there are
things you can do to minimize the effects of a crash.

1) Partition your main hard drive as a "C" drive and a "D" drive. Put
Windows on the "C" drive, all your personal files (documents, mp3s, videos,
etc) on the "D" drive.

Then if Windows crashes and you have to reinstall it you still have your
personal files on "D"

2) Get a second (large) hard disk in your PC. For a desktop PC (not a
laptop) it is fairly easy to put a second hard drive in the case. You can
buy a 200Mb hard drive for less than ?100 nowadays. See here:



You can copy important files to this hard disk (as a sort of backup) so that
if you do get a crash you at least have your important files on another drive.

3) If you have a laptop, or do not want to open the case of your PC, buy an
external drive to plug in the USB port.

Again, these are fairly cheap. Here is a 300Gb external drive for ?160.00.
Cheaper options are available.



4) Buy a copy of the software program Norton Ghost.

Ghost allows you to take a complete image of your C drive (or any drive)
and save it on another drive as one huge "ghost" file.

Ghost also allows you to restore this image back onto another drive in
minutes.

What I do is:
a) Set up my Windows install on the C drive. Install everything I need for
Windows.

b) Take a Ghost image of this C drive, and put the image file on another
drive (maybe the large hard disk you bought).

c) If my C drive ever crashes, I can restore my complete Windows setup
from the Ghost image in minutes.

Here is a guide to Ghost


Obviously you should take backups of your important files to CD or DVD on
a regular basis as nothing beats a backup, but the above suggestions may help.

[mark cremona]

lol, you could just buy a Mac !

[superior]

On this subject, does anyone know of any cheap software which replicates changes on a Windows drive or folder as they happen?

I want to have a pretty real time copy of certain folders on my C drive stored on my external drive - at the moment I have to shut all the programs down and then do a copy and paste which is a pain in the bum, I never remember to do it often enough plus it takes an age cos its copying everything each time!

I know there is software out there that does it at the high end in the datacentre etc (and it costs thousands of spondoolies) but is there anything to do it for a single desktop user?

Phil

[Jacques]

Or get a Linux box!

[mark cremona]

actually that was stupid, to be truthful, its a case of whatever works for you....

[Jacques]

Is this what you are after?

[superior]

Spot on, thanks Jacques - best $39 I ever spent