Backing up a hard drive...

[Doom]

Okay...so my recent build features a 500 WD Caviar SATA HDD. I bought a second identical drive and have it in an external enclosure. I would like to perioicially back up my primary hard drive to the external. The idea is that if the primary ever fails, I have a "plug and play" replacement I can insert and go with. So I've got a few questions...

1. Is this even possible? (i.e. taking out a bad hard drive, putting in the "identical" backup and just turning the power in)
2. Will I need specific software, or is there something resident in Windows Vista I can use?
3. What is "ghosting" and will that work in this case?
4. How do I format the brand new hard drive?

Thanks to anybody than can help me get a solid backup strategy with my setup. I've been horrible in the past with backing stuff up... but now that I'm building my own rigs I feel I've got a lot more invested in the system.

[BigRed CC Dually]

Okay...so my recent build features a 500 WD Caviar SATA HDD. I bought a second identical drive and have it in an external enclosure. I would like to perioicially back up my primary hard drive to the external. The idea is that if the primary ever fails, I have a "plug and play" replacement I can insert and go with. So I've got a few questions...

1. Is this even possible? (i.e. taking out a bad hard drive, putting in the "identical" backup and just turning the power in)
2. Will I need specific software, or is there something resident in Windows Vista I can use?
3. What is "ghosting" and will that work in this case?
4. How do I format the brand new hard drive?

Thanks to anybody than can help me get a solid backup strategy with my setup. I've been horrible in the past with backing stuff up... but now that I'm building my own rigs I feel I've got a lot more invested in the system.

1. Yes it is possible, you would need to "Clone" the HDD periodically if you want to remove the old one and replace it with the new as if nothing had ever happened.

2. Acronis "True image" software will do this.

3. "Ghosting" is a term that is the same as Cloning, here is a link to the Acronis site http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/?source=us_google&ad=drive+ghosting&s_scid=ghosting%20a%20hard%20drive|1157528057&gclid=CKnj4IvKq5MCFRUdsgod5itdpA

4. The Acronis software will take care of the required formatting, new or used harddrive.

You can also do periodic backups with the software, but you are creating an image file vs cloning. You restore the image to the old drive to recover the data, with the cloned drive you can do as you want to in question 1., remove and replace.