With huge hard drives being relatively inexpensive now, I put an internal drive into an external drive case and clone the C drive to it periodically. That came in real handy when my laptop drive died died last year. All I had to do was pull the dead drive out and replace it with the clone that had been done in the last week and I was back in business. I prefer eSata setups because the data transfers more quickly than USB.

I do a clone about once a month but also do scheduled automatic backup of changes to data about 3 times a week. I have different backup programs on the 7 computers that my wife and I have. I've found that while Norton runs fine on several computers, it doesn't run at all on the others. Same is true with Acronis True Image. Runs great on 3 of the computers, crashes like a demolition derby car on the others. My newest VISTA 84 bit gateway chocked on everything but True Image and that included the built in Microsoft formatting and backup stuff. At least in my experience, these programs don't run equally well on every computer.

Keith
2025 Audiophile Windows 11 RYZEN THREADRIPPER 3960X 4.5GHZ 128 GB RAM 2 Nvidia RTX 3090s, Vegas,Acid,SoundForge,Izotope Production,Melodyne Studio,SONAR,3 Raven Mtis