[Thermodyne]

There are some more or less standard solutions, but they all depend on what operating system you are running. As Rdouglass has already posted, backing up to removable media is your best solution. If you take the time to do the back ups, and do a test restore once and a while, they are very reliable. Disk images are OK, but it would take a lot of time to do on a daily basis. If you want on the fly protection, then you need to set up a mirror; just remember that they need to be backed up too. In short, backing up to a second drive is not really a reliable back up, it only protects against the failure of the primary drive. If I remove IBM hard drives from the equation, main Boards fail more often then hard drives on the average home computers I service. And there is one very popular chipset in wide use that is becoming notorious for corrupting data written to the hard drive if default bios settings are used.