Best way to backup my home computer

[Narfy]

I have like ~$7k worth of data on my harddrive and I need to back it up daily, what kind of hardware/software should I get to do this? I want it so it automatically backs it up at a certain time and if my hard drive does fail, I can buy a new one and copy my backed up data onto the new hard drive and it will copy over everything, like the OS, registry, all the files/folders so I dont have to reinstall anything, I just copy the backed up stuff over to the new harddrive and my computer is ready to use.

edit: I dont want to backup onto a spare PC, and i have about 120gb worth of data needed to be backed up.

[RobDog888]

You could do a few things. Do like me (if your mobo supports it)
create a RAID Mirror between two hds. Then if one fails you just
replace the drive with a new one and re-create the mirror. Or you
could buy a Tape Backup drive and backup software, but probably
the more expensive solution. Or you could buy a extra drive and
backup using program like Backup My PC, I think its called, and
backup to the extra drive.

At work all we put into place for our client solutions is Veritas
BackupExec to a Tape Backup Drive. Some of our own servers use
both a RAID Mirror and BackupExec.

Oh ya, if you are running NT 4/2000/XP, you can use the Backup
program in Program Files > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.

HTH

[dglienna]

Norton Ghost will do an image of your hard disk. It may require more than one CD if there is enough data to backup.

With tape, you could do one master backup per week, and incremental backups every day, but to reload, you have to use both sets of tape.

My older tape drive only held 120Mb of data. The cost of the tapes was making it cumbersome, so I just use a different computer for the important stuff.

A RAID system sounds like a good solution if you can afford it.

[Narfy]

ok, thanks for all the replys, but I just decided to use one of my spare linux machines then just use ftp and transfer the data to there.