Our computer has been working great

Pretty well, anyway.

So far.

But it -- our Dell desktop -- is more than 4 years old. And 4 years in computer life has to be something like 60 years in human life. Clearly it's time -- actually, way past time -- to take precautions. So a few months ago I started backing up our data to an external hard drive. If the internal drive crashed, I'd just unplug the external drive and plug it into our laptop.

This is much less than perfect protection, because we don't have the same programs on the laptop as on the desktop. So, for example, our QuarkXpress files will be useless on the laptop because QuarkXpress isn't installed on the laptop. (Our old, knock-off version of QXP runs OK on the desktop machine under XP, but it doesn't work at all under Vista on the laptop.) The same goes for our movie making software, tax preparation software, any number of utility programs, and on and on.

So, . . .

Last night I copied everything on the desktop's internal hard drive over to the external drive. Everything -- data, programs, drivers, settings -- everything. Then I made a bootable CD that will get the desktop up and running if the internal drive can't do the job. Thus, if the internal drive crashes, destroying our data and refusing to boot the computer, I'll just pop the CD into the machine and boot from that; once booted, we'll be able to use the external drive to do anything we would have been able to do if the C: drive hadn't crashed.

I hope.

I haven't quite figured out how to test whether all this will work the way I think it will. One way, I guess would be to uninstall the C: drive. Yeah, like I'm going to do that! I'm dumb, but I'm not stupid. I think I'll just cross my fingers and hope.


PS I used Acronis True Image to copy everything to the external drive. It didn't work the first time I tried, but it worked fine twice after I ran CHKDSK. I used the free trial download of Acronis. Since it worked so well, I guess I should buy the thing.

PPS Even if the backup does work the way I hope it will, it still won't give us perfect protection. If the computer dies because of something other than a crash of the internal drive -- say, the mother board (whatever that is) has a heart attack -- we'll be back in the position of having to disconnect the external drive, plug it into the laptop, and limp along with a much reduced set of programs.