I now have two hard drives in my pc after a recent catastrophy - details here!
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread17368.html

So, I now have a 160gb western digital and a 80 gb maxtor. The 160gb is my main hard drive - the 80gb drive is now empty. I have quite a lot of files to save, photos, 15gb worth of music documents etc. From bitter experience, I now want to make sure that my stuff is regularly backed up, once a week if possible. I have a DVD writer, but to use that is timeconsuming as it'll have to go across multiple discs. I have a couple of ideas - I'd really appreciate people's opinions on them:

1. I could use the spare HD to store all my documents, music etc. That way it would all be easily rescued if the main harddrive went wrong, or had to be rebuilt because of a XP failure. That does mean if the spare HD develops a hardware fault then I lose the lot.

2. I could regularly back up all my important stuff from the main HD to the spare which means I have two copies of everything. Does anyone know of any programs that could do this for me - copying across set folders and files by running a single script?

Any other ideas / opinions gratefully recieved!

If you're running Windows, which I assume you are from your previous post, then you should could just use ntbackup. What I have done for some clients in the past that are using a hard drive for backing up was to create a full backup job once a month and an incremental every night. Yeah it would be a royal pain to restore a full directory to the day before the first of the month, but it takes up the least amount of space.

Also, only backup that which you cannot recreate from other media. For a home PC, it may not be necessary to backup anything other than your data as a complete rebuild isn't that big of a deal.

Cheers

I would just run a system state backup and then backup folders you want backed up. I normally try to store a ghost image also which helps if I need to do a full restore.

If you wanted a exact copy of you're hard drive you could use Acronis True Image. This would be the best way, and it works better than Norton Ghost. The other options are make a back up from "C" to "D" as mentioned below, or just make a copy of what you want to save on "D". I would advise to make the "D" drive bootable, incase you need to use it if "C" is crashed