I have a question about saving things from my compter. I know that they say it's always best to save to a CDR as that's the best way to save and back up everything on your computer. A CDRW takes way too long since you have to erase and copy to it again. A flash drive or jump drive is nice and quick but can go out at any time thus resulting you losing everything on there that can't be recovered at all. The same goes for an external hard drive as well. I know that you can put things into folders so everything won't be so jumbled when you go and look for something you've saved, but that would be after several months of saving and I've thought of saving everyday as I go as well, but then if I saved all my pictures to one CDR that would make sense and all Word Pad Documents to another, etc., but if I did that then they would be all jumbled as time goes on still, and thus resulting in a long search just to find what I need right there and then. I want to save everyday as I go along in case my Hard Drive goes out. My question is this: Do you have any suggestions to make saving things as I go much more less time consuming for search and jumbled reasons as I go on?

But like I stated, it still is all very confusing to say the least when you do that since the disk will only put on there what you do and not in order as you add to it. When you say keep a nice catalog of records, how do you mean?
I was gonna put all E-Mail on one, pictures on another, and word pad stuff on another etc.

What I have is a second internal HD. If my pc crashes it only affects the main drive and my backup drive is left alone. I put EVERYTHING (music, documents, pictures, etc..) on that drive and all my applications and games and everything I use to run my pc on the main drive. You access the back up drive just like any other icon on your desktop and you really don't even realize you have everything safely backed up, but when your main drive goes down and you have to reformat it, when you get it back up..theres all your stuff on the backup drive smiling at you.

Sort of.. I'll say this: I recently downgraded back to XP from Vista. That basically simulates a computer crash/reformat. ALL my information and everything I listed above was on my backup drive. After he was done reformatting and reinstalling XP I still have every single last file on my backup drive. So if for some reason your pc has a meltdown or you just get it reformatted then the backup drive should be fine, it runs completely independent of the rest of the pc. Still a good idea to keep backing files up on disc regardless and just make a nice catalog of records. You don't have to keep erasing and rewriting discs. just know what is on what disc and catalog.

Well that's kind of the point of a backup drive.. Stuff YOU want to back up. As for system information and all that good jazz, the reformat disc (I.E. XP OS disc) has all that information. E-mails are not kept by your computer, it's kept by the server you are on (I.E. I'm on hotmail.com and can check anytime anywhere and everythings there, backing them up isn't a bad idea if they're important, but I really wouldn't worry about it.

To clear up the catalog thing: yes put email on one, pictures another and so on and so forth. Just remember to DATE and FILE each one in an orderly fashion so you know where to get it from when you need it.

If my computer were to blow up right now.. short of an actual explosion.. I would have enough reassurance to know I could still take it somewhere and get all my information with no issue. AH the beauty of 2 separate hard drives.

No idea, I don't use Outlook. If you know the subject line in one of your emails, do a system search for it. Unless you're on Vista..then you need to look around until you find it because the system search part of vista doesn't work for crap.

I know what you're saying about the E-Mail like when you have an account on a server (for example: Yahoo), but that being said, what if they download to your computer via Outlook Express, then what folder would you find them at on your computer to save and back up?

If you are worried about backing up email, you should be using a service like Gmail for email and then use either the website to access your mail or IMAP if you really want to use a local application. That way it is backed up by Google.

Thanks for sharing that with me, but I don't choose to do that. That is a nice idea though, but wouldn't it go out farily easy as well being that when you turn your computer on that it's also spinning as well? Please comment on that for me. Thank you!