That is indeed a real drag and it is so important to keep all your work backed up. There is another useful program called 'True Image' by Acronis. With this you can image copy your entire main hard drive and then restore it when you need to. You also can boot up from a special Acronis disk CD/DVD (as you may not have access to Windows when your hard drive has failed). If you have your image copy stored on say an external hard drive then you boot using your Acronis disk and then restore your complete disk to a new drive. If your old drive is still working but not accessible to Windows then Acronis TI will write over it or you could use it to populate a newly replaced hard drive. The great thing is that you then have a complete operational system hard drive with all your settings, installations etc exactly as it was before. Many hard disk manufacturers also offer free equivalents like Seagate DiskWizard which is essentially a free version of Acronis True Image. You have to have a Seagate or Maxtor drive on your system to qualify to use it though. Acronis True Image has rescued me a few times and it is definitely worth having something like this in your arsenal as well as making general file backups.

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