Everyone will suggest doing a backup (or several backups) to avoid a computer disaster. If the backups are done on a partition of the same hard drive, the backup protection is limited severely. If there is a major diaster with that main hard drive, it could impact every partition. All the backups done on separate partitions, in effect, become part of the catastrophe and become essentially useless.

Indeed do backups. However, do the backups to a separate drive. If you do not want to go to the trouble of installing another internal hard drive, external hard drives are affordable and easy to use. You may want to do your weekly or daily backups there.

The weekly or daily backups will save losing any work done. What happens, though, when that hard drive has a major failure. You do not want to spend days reinstalling your operating system and trying to restore your computer to all the program preferences that you like. It is exhausting and a drama / trauma that can be avoided easily. The solution is to clone your present hard drive to another hard drive - whether it is an external drive or an internal drive.

A clone is a replica of your present hard drive. It will include everything - operating system(s), software, preferences and so forth. It is a snapshot of your computer and can be used when your current primary hard drive fails. With the clone, for example, you do not have to reinstall one program at a time and play with the preferences to restore the computer to the way you want it to operate. The clone will save all that work with one installation.

Two objections that have been common to cloning a drive is that it is complicated and it is expensive. Here is a program that addresses both these concerns. The program is XXClone and it is free. XXClone makes “a self-bootable clone of Windows system disk” and “supports all 32-bit Windows (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP)” - sorry Vista users.

link: What is XXClone

link: XXClone Home Page

The free version has been reviewed by numerous people on Windows 2000 and XP systems. These are people in the security community. I would like to extend my thanks to them for helping with the assessment of this program. Personally, I have assessed XXClone (freeware version) numerous times on XP systems. For me, it worked flawlessly, each and every time. And it was easy to use. Of course, the usual disclaimers apply to this product.

With XXClone, it was possible to easily restore my present operating system. Thankfully, these were just simulations and it was not an absolute necessity - yet.

Catherine Forsythe