Automatic Hard Drive Back-Up?

[argent]

This weekend my hard drive bit the dust and I'm going to computer hell because the last time I backed her up was about a year ago, so here's a question that I hope someone can help me out on.

I am going to replace my hard drive and was thinking about picking up a second one of exact specs/size/manufacturer in the hopes that I could run them concurrently and that whenever I would save (specifically documents) to my main drive that the computer would save an exact, uncompressed duplicate on the second drive. Is this possible and if so how do I accomplish this.

I have seen programs that will do something similar but the problem I have found is that they often use a proprietary compression/back-up protocol for the second save and if I were to try to restore the files on another machine with the same OS but slightly different config, the restore feature won't work (this is based on a past "bad" experience with a Colorado back-up program and another software utility that I used). But I digress, anyway ... can anyone educate me here?

Thanks.

[allenb1963]

It may be in your best interest to look into splurging and setting yourself up with a RAID 1 storage system. That way, barring catastrophe, you aren't ever put in this situation again. Alas, I too digress....

A little more background info if you please....as in OS, EIDE or SCSI, those types of things. The more you give, the more you get. ;)

[argent]

Thanks for the reply. I'm just running Windows 98 SE with an IDE (or should I say was).

In any case, I have heard of RAID but isn't it expensive and how do I get this set up? Is there a good reference on how to do this, or do I have to rely on an external source of support? Basically, what I was hoping to find was a way to redundantly save documents automatically.