People contact me constantly with the age old issue of a failed hard drive with pictures of their family, friends, weddings, etc on it. Sometimes I can save them, sometimes I can't.

So here is friendly tip from me to you on how to automate a nightly "clone" of your entire hard drive. In the event of a hard drive failure or even an operating system crash, you can completely recover the hard drive, operating system and all with just a few steps.

1. Buy this an external hard drive which is at least twice the capacity of your internal hard drive.

2. Buy this Acronis True Image home version.

3. After installing this and plugging in this , have this clone this to this .

Acronis lets you set up a scheduled backup, so what I do is set it up to perform the clone at 2am, and when I am done with the pc at night and go to bed, I leave it on. The clone takes place, acronis shuts the pc down and I am good for the next day. With this setup, I NEVER worry about hard drive crashes or data loss.

Read the Acronis manual and figure out how to create revovery media (a bootable cd) and enable boot time option for recovery.

Thank you, goodnight :-)