Best Way to Backup an Entire PC?

mapleleaf1010

I'd like to back up my entire laptop including Vista Business, Office 2007, etc (rather than only documents and photos).

Is it better just to drag and drop to the external hard drive or should I use a special software for that?

Thanks in advance. x

Niv

What is your aim here? For example if you copy and paste the installed office program onto a external HDD it will not work on say another pc nor will it work if you did a complete re-install of your current pc and 'copied and pasted' everything back to your HDD. Office (for example) needs to be installed onto a pc an installed version cannot be copied and pasted from pc to pc (as far as i nkow unless things have changed alot since I did this sort of thing - which a doubt).

Richie-from-the-Boro

mapleleaf1010 wrote: »

I'd like to back up my entire laptop including Vista Business, Office 2007, etc (rather than only documents and photos).

Is it better just to drag and drop to the external hard drive or should I use a special software for that?

Thanks in advance. x

With the Business and Ultimate versions a built in backup is already included. I assume you want a whole backup of your operating system too.If so a drag & drop will not work. Use the inbuilt backup to make an image on an external USB drive.

JJ_Egan

Or something like Acronis True Image Norton Ghost etc .

jje

johncalvin7

copy paste the files to any external hard disc or burn it in to a DVD.

savemoney

Another vote for Acronis True image brilliant for backing up HDD and folders used it for many years

You can get 2010 version fro 18 on Amazon or more for 2011 version

JasX

if you want to backup whole installed programs you should take a full disk image

daniel_owen_uk

Edit!!!

Wrote a whole post on RAID then see it's a laptop, ignore this

Trinitrotoluene

daniel_owen_uk wrote: »

Edit!!!

Wrote a whole post on RAID then see it's a laptop, ignore this

RAID is not a backup! Go and stand in the corner

Linbox

To back up the entire laptop use Ghost see - http://www.djinnsplace.co.uk/ghost.html

daniel_owen_uk

Trinitrotoluene wrote: »

RAID is not a backup! Go and stand in the corner

But when you are backup up "an entire PC" it's really the sort of thing you are looking for.

Although obviously it would only backup against hardware failure and wouldn't backup against user error.

Yeah probably not the best idea thinking about it