I bought a 250 Gigabyte outboard hard drive last summer to back up the data I considered important, but even the assurance of this safe storage doesn’t prevent the pain and suffering of building a new drive after a catastrophic failure.  We’re talking about hours of work installing your operating system, updating it and then reloading all your applications and data.

The solution . . . while your drive is still healthy, clone it.

The main drive in my three-year-old Gateway started making ominous noises each time I booted up the machine so I rarely shut it down.  Then I found a free drive copying application here.

The procedure requires some knowledge about primary and secondary IDE masters and slaves so, unless you are comfortable mucking about in your machine, find yourself a geek to do it.  You could lose everything otherwise.

It took me slightly over three hours to produce an essentially identical drive for my machine . . . minus the mechanical fault.  I removed the old drive, replaced it with the clone and the machine is beautiful again.  I plan to make a copy of this new drive for storage every six months or so as added insurance.