I just started reading Perry Bible Fellowship yesterday!
Are you stalking my internet activity? :p
Nah, it's that these things tend to "make the rounds". I got the link off of http://slumbering.lungfish.com/ myself, not from cyberstalking.
Ive recently started using MirrorFolder at work to do real-time mirroring of my primary drive to a backup. It installs itself as a software RAID driver, and has the ability to selectively exclude subdirectories. In theory if my primary drive fails (like it did a few years ago), I'll just make the mirror the master and boot from it. Even if that doesn't work, it's a normal filesystem so it will be accessible from a recovery disk. Oh, and the mirror doesn't have to be the same size as the primary either.
ericball-- that sounds cool!
The good news is that RAID is much more common in new computers with SATA IDE, that is to say, serial connections to hard drives (etc.) instead of those big parallel ribbon cables. Some PCs, or maybe it was some HDs, let you do different raid setups on different partitions on the same two drives, so that your data can be on one partition that's mirrored, while the second partition can be striped (half the data goes to one drive, half to the other) for speed without security.
Kirk, now that you're at or nearly at a naked install, I recommend you patch the bastard, Service Pack update it, etc. and install the basic utility set (important editors, winzip, acrobat reader, updated media players, etc.) and clone the disk. Also a good time to set one of those rollback markers in XP.