I am looking to get a 2nd (Slave)hard drive & was wondering if it is possable to backup Poser 6 and everything that I instaled ie daz items ect? If so what is the best way of doing this - not too go with PC's... As I tend to format & reinstall windows xp from time to time & hate having to reinstall Poser & all the items that I have puchased over the last 3yrs. I was also looking to get the Micro ASUS PC case to save desk space - but am concerned about over heating issues as sometime I render overnight - sometimes over 1/2 days - any advise?

I use an external HD (2 of them, actually). All my runtimes are on one of them, and all my purchases and freebie downloads (original zips and installers)are on the other. Another nice thing about an external is that, besides protecting your stuff in a reformat/reinstall, if you get a new computer (and you inevitably will one of these days) it also makes it easy to transfer everything to it in about 10 seconds: just unplug the external from the old computer and plug it into the new one; allow a few seconds for the new computer to recognize the external drive, and that's it.

Just a word of warning ... you should STILL make backups even if you have your data on an external drive. I just lost a 200MB external drive in the blink of an eye. Wind storms caused the power to surge several times. In addition, when one of my dogs jumped off the couch he caught his paw in the USB cable and the drive fell to the floor. That's all it took to make the drive completely unreadable. I tried to use SpinRite to recover the data, but it was estimating over 5000 hours to do the entire drive. Backup, backup, backup.

I've also got a DVD burner on layaway at WalMart (same place I got these external drives) and when I get it out, on the first of the month, I'm also going to make some backups with that.

So how do I go about backing Poser & everything installed so that if/when I format & re-install WinXP all I needto do is use the backup rarther than have to installeverything again - so to sound thick - but I've never used back before - bad I know!

You will probably have to reinstall Poser, regardless, because when you reinstall Windows it will wipe out the registry information and dll's that it needs. Just copy everything in your Runtime folder (including external runtime folders) on to your backup drive. Then after you reinstall Poser, copy the backed up Runtime folders into their original locations and everything should be OK.

Many thanks

For the Poser installation you need only the minimum option. The rest is just copy and paste. My main installation is on an external drive, 'cause I am using Poser mostly on different Laptops. My backup installation is on my PC so I delete the runtimes on the PC at least once a month and copy my Runtimes from the external drive to the PC. Only the prefs folder of my PC is stored seperately to have my settings back by copying this into the runtime. After this action I backup my PC-Poser on an other external HD. BTW, my purchases and downloaded freebies I store on a HD and on 8.5 GB DVD's. Save often save early, this I learned in the old days of Leisure Suit Larry nearly 20 years ago and then, have a backup and have a backup of your backup ;)

Last time I backed up my Runtime it took 10(!) DVDs. Ouch.

This is why I use an external HD ;))