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I have outlived four different commercial backup products that trapped my data in obsolete, unreadable files on media that are no longer supported. Perhaps I'm a slow learner, but it seems that storing backups in a known file format on standard media has a lot to recommend it.
If you plan to (or must) do this stuff more than occasionally, get a two-port KVM switch. Plug your favorite keyboard, video monitor, and mouse into the switch, then plug your usual desktop PC into one port. When it's time to rescue a PC, plug it into the other port and switch back and forth between PCs without cluttering your (physical) desktop. Search for F1DK102P at www.belkin.com for one example of many.
When hard drives cost $0.30 per gigabyte it's hard to justify not having enough storage. Pick up a huge hard drive for the price of two tanks of gasoline, install it in your desktop box, set up a file share, and be prepared.
Yes, I've tried Wine and Win4Lin and, no, neither really gets the job done, so I just boot Windows on a separate box, with TightVNC (www.tightvnc.com) relaying the session directly to my comfy chair. It's not clear that the Windows EULA actually permits this, though, when you read the fine print.
Speaking of EULAs, it's also not clear that you may make more than one backup copy of a Windows partition or create multiple application backups. Restoring the images to a different drive or another partition will almost certainly clobber any DRM-encrypted music you've been foolish enough to purchase.
More info on the EMC project that drives my milling machine is at www.linuxcnc.org. Novell's SuSE is at www.novell.com/linux. Knoppix provides the same rescue features as SRCd, along with everything else in a full Linux distro, at www.knoppix.net. Get more partimage info at www .partimage.org.
Speaking of Windows ME, alert reader Trevor Harmon reminds me that it still allowed direct, user-mode I/O port control. Read more on FAT and the Microsoft patents at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table.
When other drive recovery methods fail, you can find inspiration at www.offliners.com/movshdwreck.mov.
