I am moving soon... will still visit here often, but I have all my stuff on this PC and I'm getting a different one when I move. I want to take ALL my stuff with me, but I don't want to spend any money and this HDD is solid in the case. It's one of those Dell HDDs that isn't armor plated like the rackmount HDDs are, this one is screwed to the side of the case and I can see the silicon boards on the HDD without even removing it. I don't think it would survive the trip and it's screwed in about 40 places, so how can I take all my stuff with me without bringing the hard drive?

you left out some iinformation. How much data are you looking to transport? What kind of data? If the were going to allow you to take the hard drive is there a reason they would not allow you to take the computer for a short while to transfer your data to another computer?

USB hard drives are becoming very affordable these days - you can get 100 gB for about $100, and the drive will fit in a shirt pocket.

Usasma, yea I know that but I'm kind of tight right now (want to buy a vid card, media player, camera etc.) and I'm looking to move about 40GB of low-priority stuff. Music, my files, you know, stuff.

For no money? That's difficult - but possible. For example, you can open 40 gMail accounts and store the 40 gB there (you'll need 40 invites, and I don't even know if they're still giving them out).

You can borrow a hard drive or a drive caddy from a friend and do it that way. Once you're done you can return the stuff to the friend.

Borrow about 100 CD-RW's and copy the data that way.

You can borrow a crossover cable to connect the PC to another PC and copy over the data.

Not much else I'm afraid, it's your data and you'll have to figure out what's acceptable for you. FYI - At my shop, we charge $160 to backup 40 gB of data to DVD's.

I know the peace of mind involved with spending $160 on backing up to a separate HDD, but what does it cost your shop in reality?

Depends on the difficulty - if you've got a really stubborn backup you're saving money. If it's an easy one, you're paying us for doing what you could do for about the same price (the cost of a drive caddy, some DVD's, and a burning program (we use a full-version of Nero). BTW, we charge $100 for up to 9.4 gB of data.

The difficult one's involve:
1) Lot's of different data scattered all over the hard drive (making us hunt for the data)
2) SATA hard drives (a little bit more difficult, not a major thing)
3) a failing/corrupt hard drive that won't give up the data easily

Most of the time spent is "wasted" in that we're waiting for a program to perform it's function. With 40 gB that's a lot of waiting (both with the copying and with the burning).

Recently we backed up 2-80 gB hard drives for a man - and he provided us with a 250 gB hard drive to backup to. So we booted into PE mode and copied the entire contents of each drive to the 250 gB drive. This was his 2nd trip also, he wasn't able to locate the backed up data from our first attempt (he was looking in the wrong place). Still only cost him $160 - even though we spent many hours trying to replicate his problem and finally resorted to the entire backup before realizing he was looking in the wrong place.

I don't really care to do anything you just mentioned. My strategy would have been: copy and paste. Would that work? Oh BTW I'm going over to a friend's house. His dad wants me to help me backup his business data he would be mortified to lose. I have the backup external drive already lined up: are there any software programs free for download that allow me to set a backup drive? Like every time there's a change in those files it makes the changes in the backup?

two free options are xxclone.com


or drive image XML / made by runtime.org