Tell me how to back up to an External Hard Drive...version for "dummies" please~

I use Acronis True Image. I highly recommend it. It is easy to use and should your computer ever crash and be totally wiped out, it will restore your OS and all files in 10 minutes. I know because I have tried it. In a nutshell, Acronis makes a copy or 'image' of your HD and burns it to your external HD. First, you will make a bootable CD (I made a couple) using Acronis. Because, of course, if your computer crashes and you lose your OS, you will not be able to boot up. XP does not allow reboots or back-ups with CDs anyway, only floppies. The CD will boot up Acronis on your external, you hit Restore and voilá! everything is back just as you left it on your computer. You can run regular back-ups and Acronis will add anything new to the X drive. A handy tip: The latest version of Acronis costs $50, but they do offer earlier versions for free. You need to do a search for them. They work just as well. I use an earlier, albeit FREE, version.

It depends what you want to keep safe. If you want an "image" of the drive so that you can recreate it if your computer exploded, the suggestion above for something like Acronis or Symantec Ghost is a good idea. The problem with that is that it backs up *everything* and therefore takes quite a while. Updating your backup can take time, too, since every change on the drive is recorded (system files, programs, your files, etc.). If you just want to keep copies of your own documents, there are two ways - copy/paste or a backup program. If you're very organised (which I'm not) and keep everything in one directory tree (in other words all your content is in folders inside one big folder like My Documents), you can just copy that across to the external drive. If you're disorganised and have files all over the place or on several separate drives/partitions (like me), a backup program may be better. I don't use one myself but most allow you to select which folders you want to copy and will also track files that change over time for iterative backups. You save your backup profile, re-run it later and the computer checks what's new or changed and ONLY updates those, thus keeping everything up to date. Bear in mind that this is a CONTENT-ONLY backup: if your computer drowned in a swimming pool, you won't get your system files, settings, programs and so on back (you'd need the "image" version for that). Wiki has a list of backup programs that's very useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software Personally, I'm old school. I have a DOS batch file that does it all with xcopy commands. Sad, I know. :)