3. Preparation

	WARNING
	Do your normal backups on their regular schedule. This HOWTO is useless if you don't do that.

Build yourself a rescue disk. I use tomsrtbt. It is well documented and packs a lot of useful tools onto one floppy diskette. There is an active list for it, and the few questions I've had were quickly and accurately answered. I like that in a product my shop may depend on one day.

Next, figure out how to do the operating system backup you will need so that you can restore your normal backup. I followed Preston's advice and used an Iomega parallel port ZIP drive. The drives get approximately 90 MB of useful storage to a disk. I need about 85 MB to back up my desktop, so a 100MB ZIP drive may be pushing your luck.