ADVICE / Help Please ?? - Making a 'back-up/clone of my laptop ?

[bilabonic]

Hi All

Just had a 'fright' when my OLD Acer Aspire 5920/ZD1 would NOT boot !!!

After playing for over an hour, removing GPU, Ram etc it some how went into system restore ?

It only has a 250Gb drive and i only use around 120Gb...

It has ALL my important info/programs etcso i was quite scared !!!

I have heard of programs where they can create a back/clone to an external HDD ?

I have a brand new portable 150Gb one here...

Anyone recommend a 'way' to make things safer ? How to back up ??

Eg if this Laptop dies i can just purchase another and use the external HDD back up to 'restore' my new one....

I want to upgrade in a next few weeks...

Thanks in advance.

 

[USAFRet]

Macrium Reflect Free does this easily (sort of).
Create an image, save it to the external.

But...you can't create an image of this laptop and simply apply it to a new laptop.
Not gonna work.

 

[bilabonic]

Thanks for the reply...

What is the 'point/purpose' of creating one ?

What are the benefits ?

Cheers

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks for the reply...

What is the 'point/purpose' of creating one ?

What are the benefits ?

Cheers

It allows you to recreate the system (or drive) exactly as it was at the moment you made the Image.

If your current drive dies.
If your current OS gets a major virus.
You accidentally delete something critical.
Right before you make some major hardware or software change.

A new system, desktop or laptop, would get its own fresh OS install.
But if you separate your data properly, a clean install only affect the drive or partition with the OS and application.
Your personal data is never affected.

For instance, in my system. 5 individual drives.
Drive 1 is the OS and applications.
All others contain all my personal data. Various types on different drives.

If the OS needs a reinstall or recovery from a backup, the other data is not affected.

Or...if any individual drive dies, I can recover from last nights backup. Or from any day in the last 2 weeks.

Additionally, I have 2 baseline Images of the OS drive.
1 from Day 1, with just the OS
1 from Day 2, with the OS and my basic load of applications.
All easily recoverable to a new drive if needed.

And this backup is all automated. Once set up, I don't have to do anything.
Until there is some issue I need to recover from.

Read more here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html