The only items you have to back up are things you cannot reinstall from disks you either got with your computer or bought later.

Anything like pictures, documents, saved games if you play games, your "favorites" from your browser, etc., which aren't programs you install, you need to back up. Pretty much anything you've had to hit "save" for needs back up.

The whole hard drive seems like too much in my opinion. I keep CDs or DVDs of all above items. I have had to replace hard drives and that was enough to take care of the reinstall.

I forgot music files, need them on back up too, but as they take up so much room, you might want to keep duplicates on another computer in your home. If you have a lot of music, the back up hard drive could become an option. We keep our music on two home computers for that reason.

A program I have, called AShampoo Burning Studio 6 will do what you want. Here is the website I have linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Ashampoo Web Site

Thank you very much.

That is the plan.... to back up just the essential and saved files, not the programs.

I tried using the already-installed Sonic program to back up to DVD+RW. I formatted it using Sonic, then Sonic told me it is either corrupt, or not compatible with Windows. HUH? Previously it contained an ISO image file that I burned a few months ago. After a few tries I gave up and decided to buy a different brand of DVD that I know works on our system.

If no one can give me a hint as to why this doesn't work, I'll give AShampoo a try, sounds good.

Jen

Jenn, I usually just put a blank cd (or DVD) into the drive and when it loads I hit the reduce button, not the one that drops it out of sight, just reduce to half size. Then I go into "my computer" thru the icon on the desktop, then I click on "My Documents" and most everything I want to move is there. Then I reduce that page to half size and I start dragging things into the cd open screen and dropping them in. Works for me. If an item isn't in "My Documents", you can look for it and drag and drop it in too. When the disk is full, another screen comes up and says, "Copy these files to CD (DVD"?), or something like that, click on it and it goes to work. It's built into Win XP which I assume you are using.

As I said before, the music files are too big, at least for cd's, so I can't get many of them copied this way.

It's free and probably a little more trouble than the program above?, but just thought I'd mention the method.