Hey,

What is thee BEST way to back up a hard drive. I'm totally clueless as to what one has to do to back up a hard drive, to be honest. If I have a 250 gig external, do I need another 250 gig to back up the first one? Please tell me this isn't the case. I really don't want to have to buy another separate hard drive and waste 250 gigs just to back up the first drives files.

I heard something about imaging - what's that? And is it a method used to back up drives?

Any (and ALL) help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Imaging a drive requires software that makes an exact copy of the HDD to either removable media like CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, or to a network drive, or to a second HDD.
This method of backup allows the user to completely restore the PC to that moment in time. Most of these compress the image to fit more information in a smaller storage space.
Some of the software that can do this:
Acronis Trueimage
Symantec Ghost
Terrabytes Unlimited Images for Windows
DriveImage XML combined with BART-PE http://www.runtime.org/driveimage_faq.htm


Other strategies involve backing up your data either manually or automatically with software to removable media or tape drives.
Some of this software is quite good at making incremental backups, does not require repeat copies of data already saved, only does next snapshot of changed files.

There are ways to image a whole HDD in one go but most of the time this is done on a partition-by-partition basis. There are loads-n-oads of different imaging software that suit different people in different ways. My own current take on things (http://www.paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1917) in this area and a wiki on disk cloning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning).

Backing-up your own important files rather than cloning whole systems is just as or even more important and can be addressed in many other ways that includes good free software such as Cobian (http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm) and Syncback (http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html).