Back Up Your Photos!

[SHANEA]

I like IDRIVE www.idrive.com - affordable @ ~ $50 for 150gb/year.  The interface is clean.  There is a pause/autopause and you can throttle up/down the bandwidth used.  Throttle down during the day when working and throttle up during off hours.
I'm using a 20mb pipe cable modem.  Like IDRIVE as in disaster they will for a small fee send you a drive of all of your data for easy restore.  Also keep two miniusb drives backed up at alternate local locations and will be adding a NetGear network storage system with mirrored drives to back up all pc's on the network.     

[sandersmr]

SA Bill - I hope that you get your HDD copied over before it craps out.  I hate losing stuff like that.

And while not as dramatic as Bill's, after talking about how careful I am to make sure that my EHDs are plugged in before my Mozy backups, I realized Thursday night that I had forgotten to plug them after taking the laptop on the road last weekend.  I should have everything re-verified as not being deleted by tomorrow night if everything goes well.

[badknees]

Your best approach would be to do a clean install of the OS. This will require a lot of updates, but still is desired. After you get the OS up, bring in your backups. I would also reinstall programs rather than try to pull them from a backup.

Understood bk. PC did not come with OS disk. Any way to copy OS before the HDD dies altogether? What about something like Norton Ghost to mirror the original HDD to the new HDD, assuming the original drive works long enough to do that? Just fishing for ways to get the new HDD going as the master.
  Thanks!
    BB

If you have a Seagate HD, it should come with software that allows you to use the new HD as the master after copying the old HD. I assume WD and others have the same.

This is still not the best method, especially if you have had the OP system loaded for awhile. You end up cloning over all your junk.

[Al]

Either that or post your favorite pictures on the internet and learn to Google:

An enhanced shot of one the bird feeders in the backyard.  Painted Buntings blow me away.



Al

[presidio]

We should quit hassling presidio for photos, for what appears to be an obvious reason.

Aw, why stop the fun?  I am not bothered in the least by the comments 

Homero, carry on!

[presidio]

I bought a new HDD last night and want to install it and make it the master drive. The original drive can stay as a slave if it will keep working...or it can go away. What's the best way to do this? Is there a way to make a copy of the OS before I power down...in case the original HDD won't come back up? I know enough about computers to be really dangerous and I'm in uncharted territory...as you can tell.
  Thanks!
    Bill [/color]

Make a full image of the current drive. Go to http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml and pick one you like. You might check to see which one(s) will let you restore the image to a brand new, unformatted disk. That saves the hassle of the initial setup. When you restore the image to the new disk, go back and wipe out the bootable partition on the old drive (there's freeware to repartition drives without data loss as well).

[presidio]

Understood bk. PC did not come with OS disk. Any way to copy OS before the HDD dies altogether? What about something like Norton Ghost to mirror the original HDD to the new HDD, assuming the original drive works long enough to do that? Just fishing for ways to get the new HDD going as the master.
  Thanks!
    BB

Yep, Norton Ghost will work but you can do it with the aforementioned freeware. You are creating an exact copy of the current disk state. Restoring it to a new disk gives you everything including the operating system.