Karen, Sorry, it took me a while to find time to respond to this. First of all, Ghost is certainly a good piece of software for what it is intended for and that is to make a mirror image of a drive for quick restore. One must understand the limitations of this though. Each day you do things to your PC. You might tweak a setting here and there, install a program, update software, and apply operating system critical updates etc. Some software installs that use self contained data also default to the install directory and important data could be getting saved to the C: drive and not off on a data drive. Ghost is NOT intended to be used as backup software. To just willy nilly say it is time to run an image to keep windows clean is a very reckless thing to tell someone. Never re-do Windows unless it is a necessity. There is nothing preventative to re-imaging. If I were to recommend a course of action with Ghost it would be to make an image of your drive every 3 months or so (more often if you make a lot of changes and install/uninstall lots of software). Keep the current image and the one that the current is replacing and throw the older images away. Next is to include a backup system using software designed for that. The windows backup software is OK, but it does not backup to CDRW's so I don't like it. I am partial to Backup My PC sold by STOMP (I think) which is marketing the former Veritas Backup Executive. With this software you can schedule regular backups of your data and back up to your CDRW as long as you leave a CD in the drive when the backup is scheduled to fire. You should schedule a full backup once a week and an incremental backup for the other 6 days. Incremental backups only get files that have changed since the last backup and that helps conserve your backup media. Maintain one month's worth of backup's and if you really want to be safe, store those backups in a separate off site location. If data is being properly backed up, it really doesn't matter if your data is kept on the C drive or on another partition although for organization reasons a separate drive is not a bad idea. I do make a distinction between PC's being used for serious stuff vs. those that are just using a home pc for Internet and email. Anyone who would break into a sweat, experience shortness of breath and rapid heart palpations if their hard drive fails should be following strict backup procedures. Spider -----Original Message----- From: 24hoursupport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:24hoursupport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Karren Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 4:27 PM To: 24hoursupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [24hoursupport] Re: Reformatting and Partitioning Spider, I do use this computer for business and there always seems to be some data lost with each reformat despite various backup utilities used. Can you make a recommendation as to a safer and more stable method. Also what is your opinion of Ghost 2003? Thanks, Karren - Users can unsubscribe from this list by sending email to 24hoursupport-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field OR by logging into the Web interface at http://webpages.charter.net/chizotz/