I need to protect my system from a hard-drive failure. It's on a Dell Optiplex desktop machine with a single hard drive. This Dell only allows me to boot from the single internal disk. I have 2 usb 2.0 ports and two USB hard drives with 120G each of storage on them, all available for backups. I am using app 16G in total on my 80G internal drive, so storage isn't an issue. I am currently running 8.1 Pro, my original SuSE version. It would seem to me that the only way to get my system back would be to replace the failed drive in the machine, re-install SuSE from the installation CD, then do a full recovery from one of the USB hard-drives. Currently, I can re-install 8.1 out of the box, overlaying my data, point to a YAST backup, do a full recovery, and everything comes back and works perfectly. When I upgrade to a later version of SuSE (I've tried 8.2, 9.0, and 9.1) and try the same thing, a lot of my software no longer works after the recovery. Apparently, when you move to a later version, you lose the ability to use YAST for full recovery. So, I can either keep all of the software I currently have or I can move to a later version of SuSE, but I can't do both! I have an Oracle Enterprise database server on my Pro machine, which took tons of work to configure. I can't afford to lose it. This is what has been holding me up from moving forward. I am investigating some 3rd party software that I recently purchased that's supposed to a full recovery for you, but I'm not too sure about it after having worked with it for a few weeks. Is there a way to do this type of recovery strictly using some basic software that comes with my SuSE 8.1 Pro? Even if it's a multi-step process, if it would work, I'd like to know how to do it. Can you back up each high-level directory separately and then recover each of those back while your system is running? Any suggestions greatly appreciated, Greg Wallace