We run a PC as the basis of our digital DJ music system, comprising a main hard disk with Windows XP only on it, and a 2nd hard disk containing the complete mp3 music library, currently about 150 GB which is all we need for our purposes.

Now I have a back up of the 2nd disk on a portable USB hard disk, available immediately should anything happen to the music library hard drive, but no back up of the C drive, and if windows goes down or the C drive fails, some problems.

Can anyone suggest a better back up plan in the event of main C drive or PC failure? Having a 2nd PC to swap over wont work as the DJ software is only licensed for the one machine, and it wont work on any other machine without buying a 2nd licence and verifying it online. Its clever like that.......but if I fork out on a 2nd licence but never need to use the 2nd machine, its a real waste of money. But necessary possibly.......

Trim the C: drive down to about 5GB or less, then take an image with Acronis True Image (if you can get a copy) and burn it to a DVD. Take the DVD and an Acronis CD with you and you can restore it in all its glory in about 10 minutes.

To be honest though, in your current situation, you are better off getting a hard disk the same size as your current XP disk and then doing a mirror of the first onto the second.

You can then take that mirror copy whever you need to and should the primary disk die, it would take as long as it takes you to swap a disk to put it back how it was.

Licensing is not an issue as you are only ever using one copy live and as far as the program is concerned it's the same copy.

thanks for that, that solves the C drive problem....of course in the event of PC failure, its another story completely....

Acronis is pretty good at dealing with that because, so long as you can get a replacement box (assuming motherboard death or something equally as tragic), Acronis has something called TrueImage which deals with replacing the Windows drivers properly if you have to restore the image to a different PC.

e.g. I have a Windows installation for deploying to anyone who needs it in the company and, although most people have identical hardware on their desk, I can technically deploy it to pretty much any machine and let TrueImage sort out the main drivers for me. Then it's really just about tweaking it.


But... if it's really severely important and would be catastrophic if it were unavailable, I would recommend buying an identical replacement box with a mirror copy of both drives. It's the only real way to guarantee redundancy.

The only other thing that I can think of is using Virtual PC software (which is free) and run your music system from within that. Then all you would need is a spare laptop with the same virtual software on it and a copy of the virtual machine. However you would need extra operating system license.