Everything’s complicated. I wanted to do a complete hard drive backup on my desktop PC before upgrading to Office 2007. I’ve got a 250 GB hard drive in that machine, and I’m using about 200 GB on it. I’ve got an extra internal 100 GB HD, and an external 120 GB HD, so I should be able to get the backup done across those two devices without too much grief. But no. I burned up a bunch of time yesterday getting about halfway through the backup, then watching it blow up when it ran out of room on the internal drive. I’ve done this backup before with Retrospect, but it just isn’t working now. After tweaking a few things, I think I’ve got it right, and I start another backup. I’m puttering around doing other stuff in the apartment while this is going on; at some point, I decide to turn on the TV and check the weather. Boom. Turning on the TV causes a momentary surge (or sag, or something) that causes the computer to reboot. End of backup.
I’ve got a new UPS on order that should prevent this sort of power thing from happening again. And I picked up a 500 GB external drive at Best Buy today that should allow me to get the whole backup on one drive. (Then, I can maybe use the secondary internal drive for automated backups of key files. Wouldn’t that be nice?)