Drive manufacturers have programs to let you do that. If you buy a "retail" drive it is usually included. If not, you can download it from the manufacturer's site. It will involve a bit more than pushing a button though, you need to be able to install the new drive as per instructions, copy old drive to it using the program and following its instructions, then move new drive to old drive's channel.
If your mobo will do SATA, the Western Digital Caviar Black is a nice drive (fast & 5 year warranty). A 500GB one can be had for $59.95 at Newegg.
Partitioning a drive doesn't require skill, merely an understanding of what you are doing - derived from browsing - and a program do do it. The advantage is that the OS and installed programs can be kept on a relatively small partition which can be imaged quickly; things that seldom need backing up - music, videos, etc - can be kept on other drives.
So that whatever happens in the vicinity of your computer does not affect your backups.
So, what could happen?
A burglar breaks in and carries off everything in sight. I had this happen to one of my customers THREE TIMES in ten days. If not for backups that were completely out of the building, he'd have been more screwed. Computers and software are easily replaced; it's the data that's valuable.
A small fire, perhaps started by a cheap computer built in Bangladesh.
A user has a fit and smashes everything on the counter.
The best backup is one that is completely out of the building, since the whole building could burn down (or be covered in a mud slide, blown away by a tornado, collapsed in an earthquake, etc.).
One easy way to get your backups out of the building is to send them as an email attachement to your Gmail address. Google now allows almost 8 gigs of storage space.
GHOST is a separate application program and has no connection to, nor requirement of, any other Symantec product. You may use GHOST independently of anything else.
The size of your hard disk is completely independent of the size of your on-board memory (RAM). The two do not depend on one another in any way. The larger your RAM (memory), the less the computer will have to use the hard drive to roll things in and out, but other than that you can have enormous memory and a small hard drive or vice-versa without either being the wiser.
The hard drive is not memory; it is a filing cabinet. As another poster said, memory (or RAM) is the surface of your desk - where you do your work. You can have a large desk and no filing cabinet (i.e., smart phones), or a huge filing cabinet and a small workspace, viz: "Cloud Computing."
When you buy a new, larger, hard drive it will come with cloning software. That is, you install the new drive (you'll need a screwdriver, nothing else) and run the included cloning software. In a bit, the new hard drive is ready to become your system drive. You can take out the old one. You now have a Terabyte drive with 97% free space (i.e., 968Mbytes). Not only that, it will be more than ten times faster than your external drive.
The mayor of Washington once said: "If you ignore the homicides, Washington is a safe place to live." Likewise with Norton. If you ignore its large footprint and drain on the system's resources, it's a perfectly adequate system. If it didn't cost nothin'.
Avast, AVG, and Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) are far, far better replacements inasmuch as they're FREE!
First off, these are general thoughts and might not fit you situation. I don't have a clear idea on what you want in terms of backups. Do you have a 2nd internal hard drive?
40GB is plenty for your system drive if you use it for that and don't load it up with non-system/non-app data. By "system" I mean your OS and the applications you use. Not movies, pics and other stuff that load up a drive. Those should go on a second drive, and why I ask if you have one. Your external drive is probably USB, which is much slower. Good for backing up data though.
XP with many apps attached probably won't go much past 5-10 GB. There are "special" apps that take more, but unless you have them they're not a concern. If you go to Win7 you're talking about 30GB. But then you might be talking about going to a new box, and you don't have to if XP is working for you. Bottom line is for what I'm going to recommend if we get into backing up your *system* is you want a second internal HD.
160GB will do fine. I haven't priced drives in a while so that's your call. You probably have PATA controllers on your box, so you need a PATA drive.
I agee with them. Free AVG and free ZoneAlarm is what I use. Others will argue for others. If getting rid of the Norton Suite clears up your memory problem, don't bother with more memory. Anybody else is welcome to tell you otherwise and how to do it.
Memory is the mem chips and virtual memory files on your HD. The hard drive memory is more correctly called "virtual" memory. If you haven't messed with the XP virtual memory settings you're probably okay. Getting rid of the Norton Suite should fix your memory issues. If it doesn't we can talk then.
Nothing in XP creates an image file like Ghost does. Win7 does better, but has holes, so I use Ghost. Last time I used Ghost that came with a Symantec suite I had the option to just install Ghost, which is what I did. Only reason I bought that was for Ghost - System Works I think it was called. You use "advanced" install and pay attention to what boxes get ticked. But I'm not telling to use Ghost because I don't know your goals. You already got good advice about clearing up your memory problem. For that get rid of the entire Norton suite and install the free stuff. Watch the install check boxes there too or you'll get their browser toolbars and maybe other crap installed.
Grrrr...I've been asking people (not on this NG) for YEARS about this subject! At present my 160 GB HD is what I am using for backup. It is on the same desk as my computer. How can I back up if they are not connected? Are you saying that I should disconnect it, haul it somewhere else, and reconnect it every time I want to back up???
Also: When Norton Ghost says it's doing period backup, WHERE IS IT STORING THE DATA????
Now THAT sounds like a keeper. I'm assuming we are talking only about DATA files, not programs, etc. that can be reinstalled (though a PITA).
Question #1: If I have more than one Gmail address, can I send "almost 8 gigs" to EACH of those addresses? Or only a total to ALL Gmail addresses?
Question #2: How do I back up the backups? IOW, I send, say 7 gigs of data files today. What happens when I have new data next week? Does the new batch override the existing, or supplement it?
I should have mentioned that a rep. at Norton sent me the Ghost FREE because I had been unable to get GoBack to work. She explained that Ghost had replaced GoBack. (Now I can't get GoBack to shut the hell up; every time I boot up, it's there, asking if I want to reinstall it. I can't get rid of it through Control Panel Add/Remove Programs. It comes up with "error 1327, invalid Drive F". (My Ext. HD varies between E and F depending what else is running.) That's when I contacted Norton in despair, and they sent me the Ghost. Wish there was a computer silver stake I could drive through the heart of GoBack
-- like they used to do with vampires -- bury them at a crossroads and drive a silver stake through their hearts. )
Depends on how serious you are about not losing the data. I don't use an external HD, but their big advantage is portability. Sometimes my kid leaves me his external with a bunch of stuff on it. I plug in the power cord, plug in the USB cable, and that's it. What's the big deal? Not telling you what to do. Just pointing out that a lightening hit or a fire will get all your data. Maybe you don't care enough about it move backups away from your desk. I don't do it myself. When there's thunderstorms around I do usually unplug my PCs and peripherals connected to them. Just one plug, since I use a plug strips. Of course they say you never see the one with your name on it.
You should learn something about file structures on your PC. If you don't even know where the data is, there's no sense in backing it up. You don't even need book nowadays.
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If you don't learn some basics, you might as well have somebody else take care of your PC for you.
Each. Gmail has no (easy) way of knowing that multiple email addresses belong to the same person or company. Nor do they care.
The attachement is part of a specific email. Subsequent emails will not overwrite existing emails, so you'll have sequential backups. Of course with a 7gig backup and an 8gig limit, the second email will fail with a "mailbox full" (or similar), so you'll have to delete the previous email (and its attachement) before you can send the current backup (usually a bad move inasmuch as its prudent to maintain several "generations" of backups).
You could establish, say, five Gmail addresses: snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com, etc.
Then, each Monday, delete all your emails from the corresponding account - thereby freeing up space in the mailbox - before firing off the latest backup.
In the alternative, there are companies that will automate the entire process for you (at a cost). Here's a chart:
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In passing, I must say that 7gigs worth of backups is a LOT. It's an ENORMOUS amount! I suspect you're backing up stuff that exists on CD-ROMS or the web that can be easily replaced - things such as programs, operating systems, and the like. You may be able to reduce the size of the backup in several ways:
Don't backup stuff that can be downloaded or restored from other media, such as application programs.
Copy never-used stuff (vacation pictures from 1998, etc.) to a CD or DVD and put that in a fireproof box under the bed.
Move your pictures to a free web-hosting service such as Photobucket or Imageshack. Your photos are readily available to you, but take up zero space on your hard drive.
Use a backup method that compresses whatever is being backed up, rather than a file-to-file technique. The gold standard is some ZIP utility. Word processing documents can be compressed 90%, photos almost not at all. In general, a ZIP file will occupy 20% or less of the total disk space of its constituent members.
As far as backups go, most of us aren't nearly paranoid enough, given we keep personal financial and other critical data on our computers. What would you do if you had a fire that destroyed the room where the computer (and back-up external drive) are kept, or the whole house?
One on-site solution is to make your backups to your external hard drive, unplug it and put it in a small fireproof safe with the rest of your irreplaceables like birth certificates, passports, deed to your house, etc. (How many of you don't even have those protected?)
HeyBub's off-site suggestion with Gmail is one way to go.
One that Lifehacker.com recommended that I'm going to set up this week (now that our church has handed off running the cold weather shelter for the homeless to another church) is called Dropbox:
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tho' you only get 2GB storage for free, and pay monthly for more.
Another idea is something my brother-in-law uses called Carbonite
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While you pay a yearly subscription of $55, it gives you peace of mind in a lot of ways, with guarantees of never losing your data, heavy-duty encryption to protect very private data, and simply automation of the back-up process.
All these cloud solutions have one major drawback- they assume the internet will be running. Major natural disaster, it could be weeks before you have a good connection. I am guilty as most about no backups or safe storage, especially considering that I sorta do computers for a living, and have actual training on this stuff. Bought a fire safe five years ago- it is still in the box.
For the REALLY critical stuff, 8gb thumb drives are down below 20 bucks. Zip it to that, or to an alternating pair of them, Hide it at least at the other end of the house, or if you have a lockable desk at work or a nearby relative, hide it there.
How do they guarantee they will never loose your data? Do they guarantee they can never go out of business or maybe that their system has no possible flaws?
How can you know the encryption is "heavy duty"? I will grant you that they have great marketing but where is the peer review of their methods so there is reasonable assurance a back door isn't built in?
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