Hey Alex,

I just switched over to backing up my system nightly to an external hard drive using Acronis True Image. It's like ghost and works well for me.

During the beta releases of Visual Studio 2005 the versions of the .Net framework on my system got all screwy and I played with it enough so that finally my Tablet PC wouldn't boot. Not to fret, I just pulled my Tablet's hard drive and put it in an external USB enclosure. Then I connected both the Tablet PC drive and the external hard drive with the backups to another computer and restored the image from the backup to my Tablet PC drive. I stuck it back in my Tablet and everything worked fine. It rebuilt the partitions and everything.

Of course you can backup to DVD's or what have you as well.

Also, note that if I had a system with an internal DVD drive I could have just booted of the bootable media that Acronis allows you to build, but lacking an internal DVD drive on my tablet I had to pull the hard drive out.

Aloha,

James

>Hi,
>
>Having just gone through a had disk replacement I am investigating backup software. We make backups of the programs we develop and data into zip files that are later copied to DVD, but not of system files and other programs.
>
>Would appreciate recommendations. Ideally it would be an automated system.
>
>TIA,
>
>Alex