HDD Crash is the worst thing pc users would ever encounter. When your harddisk fails, surely you only have 10% or less possibilities that you can recover you personal files, mp3s, software installer and many more important stuff you downloaded from the wide wide web. it took you months or even years to collect bu in a blink of an eye... *puff* ... its gone. we can't prevent hdd to crash but we can make backup of our files, datas, etc so that if the hdd crashes we can buy new one and copy from backups. there are many ways of backing up your datas and i want to share how i backup important files from my rig. first i organize accordingly all files i want to backup according to their usage. after organizing i compress them all in a single file and burn them in dvd/cdr. commonly i use a good quality cdr for cdrom is more widely used than dvdroms. we know cdr have just a max capacity of 700-750mb so you may think you can't save a giga-size of files into it but hey, yes you can and you can without using any 3rd party application. its just right there sitting in your windows xp operating system. IExpress is a tool that creates custom, self-installing, self-extracting packages (or .cab files) of applications using a hidden feature of Windows XP. Its real simple, works better than rar and most other compressions. To use this feature, [b]Start–>Run–>iexpress and follow the instructions.[/b] Pros: Amazing Compression for documents data, converts files to exe,cab format. Cons: Unpacking time is really high, but guess its worth it! For more images and a full walk through follow the [url=http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/ie/reskit/ie4/appendixes/appendl.mspx?mfr=true]Microsoft Link[/url] [img]http://img.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/technet/images/archive/ie/reskit/ie4/appendixes/apxl_01.gif[/img] whats good about this compressing method is you can extract your files in a Windows OS without any other software needed. -------------------- Thank you is very much appreciated...