Moving data, etc to new hard drive

[Chris]

Hi Guys--

I have a 4 year old Dell Dimension XPS T500. Last
weekend I installed a new hard drive (80 GB) because my
old HD is small (13 GB) and because I had no backup to
important files and programs.

Any suggestions about backups? My friend said to create
a folder called "Old hard drive" and copy everything on
my C drive into it. That way there is a backup for
everything and I could easily retrieve any or all if my
old drive has problems or crashes.

Is this the best advice? Any other suggestions? Will
this work satisfactorily?

Thanks,
Chris