MrKite:

Thank you for posting your message at the Dell Community Forums.

Take a look at the following link for more information:

Protecting The Windows XP System and Data.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Chris, Thanks very much for the response, I acquired that link yesterday, and it was very helpful in setting up the backup. Unfortunately, I have encountered a really weird problem. I set up the backup for normal, following the steps in the wizard. I copied the files to the external HD, it took about 1 1/2 hours for the copy and another hour for the verification. All went well, backup succeeded. Then, however, I attempted to defragment the HD with the new files. The defragmentation would not finish (hung up on 48%), and when I canceled, I got a message that the data had been lost. Also, when I analyzed beforehand, all the new files were in a giant block of red, no blue whatsoever. I've never seen that. I tried once more, changed a couple of the settings in the wizard, same result. My data wasn't reported as lost this time, defrag never got past 3%. The same files defrag just fine on my internal HD. My best guess is that the files are somehow getting corrupted during the backup procedure, but I don't know how. I have gone through this same procedure before, using a third party backup program, and never had this problem. I'm stumped.