Portable Hard Drive Question!

[ratchet]

I see Staples has a 60GB Western Digital on sale for $90. A quick search found Walmart has an off brand 80GB for $80. If I wanted to spend even less, there are probably smaller and even less expensive ones. I have used less than 20GB of the 80 on my PC. I have never backed anything up. Since my adult children have most of the family photos on their respective PCs, most of the "worth" on my PC are passwords to accounts and websites, freeware and shareware (ZA Pro, NOD32, Spy Sweeper and ewido) and bookmarks. My question is: would I be able to backup all those programs and files on an external drive and if something happened to my HD, just reinstall everything off the portable? Like I said, I've never done a backup so I really don't exactly know how it works, although with XP, most things are almost self explanatory. I also don't know what can and can't be backed up. Don't you just hate us 58yr old pc illiterates? Thank You!

[Swimmer]

I have an 80gb western digital with their back up software, which i never use.. more on that later..

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=186&language=en

That is what westerndigital offers.. It sounds a solution like theirs would work great for you.. Check out their faqs and search for backup..

The other option is if you dont want a rolling backup, something like a hard drive that automatically backs up ever night or two.. you could use CD/DVD as your medium.. I do this for stuff that doesnt change a lot.  Pictures and important documents go on to the DVD and into a case..  This way if the back up drive does fail then I still have a copy..

I personally use a comabination of the two.. For stuff that is always changing I used a Samba storage server, basically a virtural hard drive.  Then for my docs that are either finished or have not been edited.. they go onto a DVD-RW/CD-RW..

At the end of the school year.. everything that I did that year goes onto a DVD-R for safe keeping just incase i need a reference in the future..

Hope that helps a little bit..

Maxtor also has a solution.. however I have not used it..