This evening, whilst my wife was logging on to XP, the power cable came out of the laptop and it died (the battery is knackered). This resulted in some kind of failure which lost all her Outlook Express emails, IE favourits etc. as XP seemed to re-create her user name.

It is pretty much resolved now though (Thanks in part to NCarring ) but I'd like to avoid this in future.

The laptop has a 20gb hard drive, I ahve an external 80gb USB hard drive.

Is there some way to back everything up onto the external drive so that if it all goes horribly wrong, I can simply copy the whole lot back again?

I use Acronis True Image - prior to that Norton Ghost 2003 (can't cope with SATA drives) - but only do regular backups of Partition C.

Hard disk drive cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copy

Whatever happens to Partition (Drive) C - virus, spyware - I can be back up and running with a previously saved snapshot in 10 minutes.

And everything - passwords, login data, whatever is restored.

Windows XP Backup Made Easy

any help?