I took a slightly different approach when I bought a larger drive. I got a drive imaging program, created an image and a boot CD with the image software on it and then just restored the image to the new drive (but told the image program to expand the partition size). I used a program from Terabyte Unlimited called Drive image, but Acronis True image and Norton Ghost are probably better known. Depending on where you buy the drive, sometimes they'll include a limited use version of a drive imaging program to simplify it for you.

You can move all you pictures and other data to the external hard drive that you are not likely to need often to create space. Any uninstalled programs can be moved there to store. On the existing drive you might try running Ccleaner to remove excess files and a host of other odds and ends left behind over time. The program is free and very safe when ran with the default settings. Defrag after helps too. Ideally you need 20 to 25% free space on your C drive for the computer to work smoothly.

It sounds like you want to move the data more then just back it up. You should be able to accomplish that with an external drive. The question is, do you have enough music or other files to warrant purchasing a 750 GB drive over a 320GB A couple things to remember, the external drives are great for a temporary storage medium, but I would rather have them on a solid medium as a backup such as a dvd. They do go bad as often as, and sometimes more often then internal drives. I have been working on computers for a long time, and I never understood why someone would back up the whole computer versus just their data. Most of the programs do not have the ability to restore your computer from a backup. You should have the setup cds or dvd from your computer so you should be able to (if needed) reinstall the operating system from scratch should the drive go bad or you get a virus that kills it. There are programs out there that can backup the whole system, but why would you want to? Raid, This is where you have 2 or more hard drives running the same data/ os. If your computer came with the ability to do a raid setup it is usually just 2 or more hard drives with the same data on it. For a detailed description it would be best to do a google search for it. There are different levels of raid. In my experience, the lower levels of raid aren't of much use. I have seen cases where the main drive dies and the data is not readable. In the higher levels of raid, it is spread out or stripped over several different drives and protects you from data loss. Over all, I think for home use it is just best to use a good backup strategy for data (CD or DVD or Tape) of the actual data and should something bad happen, you can restore the data and load the OS from scratch. Here is a link that might be useful: Raid defined

Thank you all for your help. I'm looking at the Acronis program and I'm wondering if there is advantage of buying it from the site cboy mentioned rather than downloading it from the Acronis site. Maybe they send a hard copy of a users guide book, etc.? Other than cost, that is. I see that I can get a free 15 day trial by down loading from Acronis. I have another ?. As I said I bought a WD My Book Essential Edition external drive. I tried just a few minutes ago to back up my Documents & Settings folder to it. I get the following message: "You have either run out of space, or the back up file (.bkf) is too large for this disk. Note: If this disk is formatted with FAT32, the maximum possible size for the backup file is limited to 4GB, The backup operation will stop." Then this "End of Media encountered while backing up to non-removable media" What am I doing wrong? I'm using XP, 160GB internal HD, 320GB external HD