Hi,With so many addons, custom AI, scenery, and utilities, it would be a shame to face a hard disk crash or another computer failure that would render the FS installation unusuable.I generally do not back up data as most of I have the originals for, except documents which I save in different places. But I was thinking about setting up a backup solution of some sorts, of course inexpensive to protect primarily my FS installation.A couple of ideas come to mind:1) RAID1 - I have no RAID currently, just 1xSATA-I WD Raptor drive. This seems to be the seamless solution, but since Raptors are kind of expensive it may be a bit expensive to do this. Also, can I set up a RAID if I already have data on one of the drives?2) Personal Backup - with Acronis or the likes, I have a file server on the network with a 500gig drive, and I can image the FS9 folder or the entire partition to this drive and just do automated backups.3) Archive to DVD - but I have almost 40gig in my FS folder that it would take too many discs to make a backup. Plus I change the AI quiet often, the updates become obsolete quiet quickly. If you have any other suggestions for that matter it would be great to hear them as well. I

Check prices on external hard drives. That is what I use for backup. Fast enough and portable.Bob

pred02,If you want to get the best performance possible out of FSX do not even think about a RAID1 array. Your performance will take a considerable hit with the extra overhead associated with the RAID1 array.The best option would be to use a disk imaging utility such as you mentioned to backup your Flight Simulator install. I happen to use Acronis for this very task. Norton Ghost would work good as well. One thing that you should keep in mind regarding your back up strategy is that in addition to backing up the drive that Flight Simulator is installed on, you will also need to backup the OS drive associated with Flight Simulator. There are many registry entries regarding Flight Simulator and asociated addons that will be missed if Flight Simulator is installed on its own drive and you only perform a backup of the Flight Simulator drive.Backing up Flight Simulator your network is a good solution. I'm not sure if your on a wired or wireless network and would interject that a wireless network could really slow down your backup process to a networked drive. If it is financially affordable for you, seeing how the price of storage devices has greatly decreased over the last couple years, I would make recommendation to install an additional drive directly into your computer to utilize for the task of backing up Flight Simulator.

Hi,I have a wired LAN at my home Cat6/1000mbps (I ran the wiring myself a couple of years ago when renovating the house). I would set up the backups to occur during the night, and of course would do incrementals. On the file server I have 2 discs already set up in RAID so I can place the backup there. This seems to make more sense and is more secure in an event of a failure.