The term "backup" seems to imply that you must use a Backup program which is a long long way from the truth. Most of the important stuff like "Documents and Settings" can just be "Copied" or "Moved" or "Sendto" any secure media, and then recopied to the PC if needed without changing the format of your personal profile. These copies can also be read on anybody else's computer. When you look into the "C" drive you will find a folder called "Documents and setting". In sub-folders therein you will find the profile of every user account. Ones personal user account profile contains almost everything except the Operating System itself, and the program files. Those are kept in the Windows folder and the Programs File folder. Your profile includes the latest version of your registry, your individual settings, favorites and your My document etc. and more.. While Windows Backup can backup all that stuff for you, you can copy it yourself to a safe place like DVDs, and you can replace those items at any time from the DVDs. No backup program required. You can create a new folder and just drag and drop them into the folder and copy the folder to a secure media. There's a trick. You cannot copy them all from your own account even if you have Administrator rights. You must login from another Administrator account. That means going into the Control Panel>User Accounts and creating another administrator account. From there, login as the new administrator, navigate to your original user account and copy the folders. To give you an idea how much space we are speaking of, my user account Profile requires 2.3GBs of space not counting My Favorites and My Documents which I copy separately since I have them moved out of my profile to a Data partition. At this point a serious RECOVERY would still be an involved process but rather simple. You would first need to recover Windows by whatever means you have such as an XP retail version or an OEM recovery XP. Reinstall any programs that were installed on the PC at the time of the failure. If you had your programs installed to a Programs partition you might not need to reinstall them because your registry will be returned to it's original state by copying back your user profile. Now you can copy back your user profile, and your desktop and settings should be back as they were at the time of the failure. What's the advantage? Well it will return your PC back to the state it was in when you had the failure which you cannot say about most recovery procedures except imaging. These instructions are as I paraphrased them from the instructions published in a couple of the big books of XP. If as often happens you lose your User Profile it might help to have a copy made. bye Emile
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