Backing up PC

libra10

I have a Yoga Ultrabook, and although I back up documents and photos regularly, have wondered whether it would be possible to back up the whole system to a USB stick.  In the event of a problem, you could just insert the USB stick and could soon be back on track.
In a computer magazine I saw recently, there is a free download here
Although they want payment for all the features, you can download freely for basic.
The software is called AOMEI Backupper Standard, and I wondered whether anyone had used this, or anything similar they could recommend.

JJ_Egan

Yes used above and Acronis True Image .

I backup every 3 months to a separate drive on PC and a USB connected hard drive as my backup is 15 gb .

Pictures docs etc are never on C  drive but kept on a separate drive .

Neil49

Your Ultra book probably stores everything on the C drive so a full image backup will be quite large. You can get high capacity USB sticks but I use a 1gb external drive connected via USB for such a purpose and it works fine. 

Le_Kirk

Yes, I use this and it hasn't been a problem ...... so far.  I use a couple of 2TB portable drives (one for the main PC and one for the lappy) as I have a lot of data and photos.  I guess the true test will be if I ever have to use one due to a catastrophic failure of the main hard drive.

libra10

Thanks everyone for the input.
I don't take many photos or use many documents, my laptop is mainly used for general surfing, with Office and password manager downloaded, as image.
I
If I decided to buy a USB stick to download the backup software, approximately how big would it need to be?
Thanks for advice.

wongataa

Bigger than the amount of data you want to backup.  Get one the size of the disk you want to back up.

libra10

Thank you wongataa, that would be memory stick allowing for data volume of approx. 250GB?  Although  D drive is hardly used, I don't need to back this up?

Le_Kirk

You need to back up anything that you would not want to lose.

debitcardmayhem

Le_Kirk said:

You need to back up anything that you would not want to lose.

Two copies at least , and I wouldn't rely on USB Pendrives

Neil_Jones

If something is important to you, back it up, back it up and back it up again.  Nobody ever lost data from backing it up too many times, but lots of people lose data from not backing it up at all.

Pen drives I wouldn't trust long term.  Fine for taking stuff to and from work - if you lose it, its not a disaster.  But long term?  They're cheap for a reason, and they're cheap because they are disposable.

libra10

I  regularly  back up the few photos and documents I have on two different memory sticks.  I think they're quite safe, It's just in  the  event of  a serious crash, I wanted some easy way of backing up the system, with bookmarks, programmes etc, without spending ages getting back to where I would like.