A problem that comes up frequently with hard drive maintenance is the hard drive that you want to replace. This can happen because you suspect an impending failure, or just because you want a larger drive in the machine.

Most computers have enough space physically to install another hard drive, but not a spare pair of connectors to hook up both drives at the same time. To put two hard drives in place and copy (image) from one to the other requires disconnecting something else such as a CD/DVD, ZIP, or floppy drive, and then reconnecting everything after you get the original drive removed.

Once you get past 10 or 20 GB, it takes at least several DVDs or many CDs to move all the data.

If you have a network connection and another machine of your own, or a web space where you can do a remote save, you can copy everything elsewhere, change the drives, and copy everything back; but this requires installing at least a minimal OS and networking and/or browser to access the remote storage.

You can get an external drive, usually connected via USB, that you can use to mirror stuff to, then swap drives and mirror back to the new one.

The neatest method I've found is to use a homemade external drive.

You can get a "USB case," in my area about $40 (US). You can put any hard drive that's the right physical size in the case, and you have an external USB drive. The cost of the case and a standard internal hard drive, in my area recently, is a few bucks less than a "factory built" external USB drive.

The new drive that you put in the case should come with a program, usually on CD now, that lets you mirror the inernal drive to the new one in the case. When the mirror is finished, you can take the new drive out of the case and put it in the machine in place of the original drive, and the machine won't know you've done anything. If the old drive has remaining life, you can put it in the case and have a handy external USB drive you can use as "scratch space" or that you can use to backup any additional files you add to the internal one. (It's already a mirror of the new internal one.) If the old drive is too far gone, or two small, you can get another drive to pop into the case and use it for your backups.

If you do a mirror of the internal drive to the new one, and then add (uncompressed) incremental backups, you have a standby replacement that's physically swappable if you new internal one has problems.

If you get the case, put a good drive in it, mirror the internal drive, and then do incremental backups, you have about as reliable a backup as you can get without going to a full-RAID 3 to 5 drive server. The only recommended "full security" backup step omitted is the advice that your backup should be stored "off-site" in case of natural disasters.

John