Q. Is there a simple way to have everything that I do on my computer "mirrored" to a separate, external hard drive? I back up regularly, but I have learned the hard way that redundancy is the best policy.

A. You're right. It's very unpleasant when a hard drive goes south on you.

There is a way to do what you want. You can make an image of your hard drive. Then, if your main drive dies, you simply install the image on a new hard drive and you're back in business.

Two imaging programs are Norton Ghost ($70) and Acronis True Image ($50). You'll find them at, respectively:

• www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal
• www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage

If you go this route, continue to do your backups. An image captures a picture of your hard drive. If you make an image monthly, say, you'll need to back up data added after each image.

A second way to go would be with RAID (redundant array of independent disks). There are about a dozen RAID configurations. Mirroring is RAID1.