I’m pretty sure copying the whole C drive does not buy you much, except maybe some convenience. If the machine’s C drive fails and you replace the drive, you can’t just drag everything back and have Windows start working. Windows hides a bunch of files in places that dragging and dropping won’t save.
Norton Ghost can make an “image” of the entire C drive, and you can put that saved image on a backup drive. Now if the main drive fails, you can buy a new drive, install it, and boot Ghost off the CD drive and restore your backed up image onto the new replacement drive. The machine will be restored as if nothing ever happened… assuming that Ghost can read the image file. I got burned once because it couldn’t.
But the other thing to keep in mind is that over time, Windows machines get polluted with “registry turds” which slow the machines down. The Registry is probably the single worst-implemented thing in Windows. It slowly gets corrupted over time, and there’s really no good way to repair it. Once your machine is more than a few years old, a complete reinstall is maybe not such a bad thing.
Having been around this block several times, I think I’ve convinced myself that the best course of action is to be more disciplined about where you keep your personal data. I keep virtually all of my files in the My Documents tree. This makes it easy to back up, and I back that up religiously. (Now that I’m using SyncToy to automate this process, there’s a few other folders I save also.)
If my HD dies, I still have to re-install Windows and my applications. True, this is a pain in the ass, but at least when I’m done I get to start over with a fresh install and a clean Windows registry. Or if I end up deciding to buy a new PC, I just reinstall my apps.
The final step is to restore the My Documents tree and that’s just a drag-and-drop.
