At the risk of sounding techy, I will suggest two approaches. Both will use a lot of backups to another media. I have not lost a byte in several years (I have lost hard drives). It can be time consuming to make these backups. For example, my old system may take 8 hours to complete a full backup cycle of 18GB. I just run it over the night so it really doesn't bother me that much. That is what computers are for, to be working while I am sleeping! On my primary system which is old (over 7 years old) and ready to die, I have always made a full tape backup each month and almost daily incremental. The backups keep a current copy of my windows registry as well as any data files. I also do a full compare after each backup because I don't trust the tape. The full backup is essential for recovery of many programs (I don't think it is necessary for Family Origins, bless there trusting license). I have two hard drives on my old system with three operating system versions (two NT and one W2K). My genealogy and picture files are backed up to the other hard drive as another level of precaution. The full backup gives me the ability to come back regardless of the catastrophe. I am currently using the OnStream tape backup hardware and software which can be inexpensive on eBay. I just bought three tapes for $30. If you just once try to recreate your OS environment and loaded applications (including all those pesky licenses) you will appreciate the full backup. I have racks of CD and some of the special drivers I found years ago. If I had to start from scratch (the original CDs) I wouldn't be a happy camper! On my laptop, which is a very recent purchase, I am taking advantage of the new USB 2.0 interface and an external hard drive. I use the BusLink USB 2.0 40GB drive and use Microsoft's standard backup software that comes with W2K. After rebates the external hard drive only cost me $100, which was cheap compared to tape backup. I have backed up the entire laptop drive (about 8GB of OS, data, and applications) on to the external BusLink drive in about 15 minutes. The W2K Microsoft backup will capture the Windows registry during the backup. I think the Windows XP will do the same thing. I did have to breakup the backup into three separate passes because you can only write a 4GB file on the external hard drive. The BusLink external hard drive was cheaper than the tape backup, but it really requires a USB 2.0 interface. A USB 1.0 interface will be 10 times slower. I hope this helps. The basic philosophy is I never know where the failure is going to occur so a full logical file backup is my security blanket. It provides me with the flexibility to accommodate a restore when I least anticipate the need for it. With it, I can recreate the environment on any new hard drive media that is appropriately partitioned. By the way ghosting (using Norton Ghost, DriveCopy, etc.) will not necessarily work. They require the same drive as the drive the backup was made from. It is hard to find a 20GB drive these day; but if your machine was three years old or older, that is probably the size of drive you are working on. That is because ghosting is an exact copy of the hard drive image, not the files that are on your hard drive. You have to put the ghost copy back onto the same drive with the same format (FAT, FAT32, NTFS). It is a limitation I feel uncomfortable with when I don't know when the failure will occur. -----Original Message----- From: Varick [mailto:tallygators@earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 5:19 AM To: FAMILY-ORIGINS-USERS-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [FO] CPU replacement We are replacing the CPU on this computer (just got this one in July and I lost lots of stuff - particularly my address book when we installed this one). The one thing I am most careful about is my FO - that is the first thing I "transfer" and it made the move much more gracefully than did I. Please, kind computer experts and others, how do you manage to make the move and not lose anything? Floreda ______________________________