Introduction
WD MyPassport Essential 500GB USB Hard Drive
If you've ever used disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, you know that you can usually boot your computer from the product CD for backup (except Ghost) and restore operations. With an external hard drive attached (USB), you can typically back up a complete disk image to this destination as long as the product you are using has drivers that support external USB drives.
My favorite backup software is Acronis True Image, which I use to create periodic drive images so that in the event of a catastrophic drive failure, I can partition a new drive, restore the latest image, and be up and running in a couple of hours with little user interaction. This sure beats reloading Windows and all the applications and settings I have already invested the time into setting-up (at least one day, maybe two initially, and then countless moments spent tweaking from there).
