I've had a couple of disatrous failures on my PC this year. The first was a registry corruption and the second was a virus.
Both occasions needed the tecchy bod to re-format the HD and re-install the OS.
Over time, I've mislaid, lent out etc. some program disks, making the who process of getting my PC back to 'as was' very difficult.
My question is, what is the best way to back up all my inportant info (particularly programs) so they are in a safe place when/if this happens again?
I do not wish to back up my entire HD as this may simply transfer any bugs/viruses etc. that may have appeared. I simply want a 'mirror' of the selected parts of my HD when it was working correctly.

Having asked various people and having got several conflicting answers, I wonder what you good people think is the best way to achieve this?

I've had a couple of disatrous failures on my PC this year. The first was a registry corruption and the second was a virus.
Both occasions needed the tecchy bod to re-format the HD and re-install the OS.
Over time, I've mislaid, lent out etc. some program disks, making the who process of getting my PC back to 'as was' very difficult.
My question is, what is the best way to back up all my inportant info (particularly programs) so they are in a safe place when/if this happens again?
I do not wish to back up my entire HD as this may simply transfer any bugs/viruses etc. that may have appeared. I simply want a 'mirror' of the selected parts of my HD when it was working correctly.

Having asked various people and having got several conflicting answers, I wonder what you good people think is the best way to achieve this?

All you need to do is create a copy of your system at a point where everything is how you like it. There are a few programs that you can use, good ones being, norton ghost and acronis. These will back up an exact copy of how you like your system to another hdd/dvd's. Then if the worst happens you can recover back of the dvd's or backup hdd.

I prefer to use an external hard drive, and back up folders + export favourites and mails. But I'm happy to do my own reinstalls.

For your situation, where you say you have to pay someone to reinstall, I would recommend using Norton Ghost, or an equivalent program.

install a 2nd unpartitioned drive and install casper xp (http://www.fssdev.com/), it will clone your first drive.

If the first drive fails, you can then boot from the 2nd drive from the point in which you cloned your drive.

In theory you could keep a few cloned drives so if you wanted to go back to a point 6 months ago you could.

Cost is price of a new hard drive and the software, which i'm not sure of as I have the tech edition for work. Personal copies should be cheap though.