Backing Up the C:Drive

[The Bede]

... Me little ol' Dell PC lap-top is running out of puff and, after years of faithful service, may not be long for this world.

... So, I went and got me an external hard-drive by way of an insurance policy

... What I want to do is copy everything, windows, all my software and all of my files onto the external drive, so that if my little Dell fizzles out I can restore exactly what I have at the moment onto a new machine. Can the wonks advise me on this: -

1) - Can I just copy and paste 80Gb C:\ onto my new 320Gb E:\ and that'll be that.

2) - How do I just update at the end of each day? Do I have to re-copy the entire drive each night or is there a trick.

3) - I'm using Windows XP, presumably a new machine will have Windows 7. Will I feck it up if I simply copy my back-up straight onto the new machine's C:\ drive?

4) - Do I not copy Windows XP? The crucial thing is not 'Windows' it's my application software, I don't want to lose anything I can't replace on the road (or that may not necessarily be licensed in a 'conventional' sense )

... I beg of your expertise ladies and gents

 

[Toad]

The best thing is to copy all your documents to a single location and then back this up.

No point in backing up the programs as the backup is unlikey to do you any good as you can't reinstall from the backup.

If you can get a reasonable Wi-Fi connection I'd suggest using an online backup tool. That way if you lose the laptop and the HDD you'll still have everything. These also tend to be automatic so don't rely on you remembering to do the backup.

 

[Parky]

I used Macrium Reflect when I replaced the hard drive on my Netbook. It's fairly straightforward to use, you just back up your c: drive and any other partitions if you have them (d: etc.) to the external hard drive. It will also create a rescue disk for restore purposes.

If your hard drive fails, you just replace the hard drive and boot the machine using the rescue disk, then restore your c: drive and any other from the backups that you have created. There are pretty comprehensive instructions with Macrium Reflect and, most importantly, it's free software.

 

[Slowdown]

I created a virtual image of my old laptop with VMWare Converter.

My old laptop was XP, the new one Vista - I just copied stuff off the old 'virtual' laptop onto the new one when I needed stuff. And ran both for a while, until I moved my mail .pst files across to the new laptop.

I've an article on exactly how to do it from an old PCPro mag - I can mail you a scan of it if you want

 

[The Bede]

... Thanks for that information, it gets me looking in the right places

 

[cookie]

IME Acronis is the thing for backing up and restoring windows partitions. dead simple & reliable. it's got me out of the shit a few times

 

[The Bede]

IME Acronis is the thing for backing up and restoring windows partitions. dead simple & reliable. it's got me out of the shit a few times

... Cookie is the man

 

[ebbo]

Second vote for Acronis, I have a basic but mail ready C: drive back up saved with Acronis, just takes a short while to install it with a boot CD Acronis makes, works a treat.

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

restore your old laptop using Linux mint 7

makes it like a new one again