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I bought Casper XP, a drive copy utility available for $45.00/online download.

Casper is designed strictly for The Windows XP operating system.

With the spyware infested environment on the web today, A corrupt and unusable hard drive is no longer just a possibility, it's a given. It's just a matter of when.

Before I setup Casper I bought two removable drive bays on Ebay for about 30 bucks shipped and a used hard drive just big enough to act as a backup emergency drive, that cost me another 25 bucks. All told, I have 100 bucks into this backup plan including the 45 bucks for Casper XP

So I bought the Casper XP utility and it works very well. It's as easy as falling down. After I checked my main drive for errors, and spyware I then defragged it. Once I got all my ducks in a row and was sure the master drive was in top shape, I shut down all of the programs I didn't need running in the background and started making my backup drive. It took about 15 minutes for Casper XP to copy a 7 gig hardrive.

The removable drive bays I bought on ebay are great. 17 bucks for 2 plus shipping. They mount nicely in a spare 5 inch drive bay and allow me to quickly install and remove the master and slave hard drives as needed. I leave the master in all of the time and put the slave in every so often to make a new backup. I don't leave the slave in it's bay because I don't want there to be any chance of it becoming corrupt.

The Casper XP interface is very easy to understand and the software does not have a big Symantec type of footprint to slow down the system. It's only limitation is that it is designed to work stictly with the Windows XP operating system and no other. Casper XP copies your entire hard drive, note for note very very easily. For me, it's a better alternative than relying on the recovery discs that came with the computer. Recovery discs don't save your personal files and configurations that you spend hours getting just the way you want.


When it becomes nessessary to rely on the slave/backup drive that I made to get me running again after a disaster, all I will have to do is change the jumpers on the slave drive and insert it into the removable drive that is set up as "master" and I am good to go.