back up external hard drive for my laptop

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Salazar
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike Salazar

I have a dell laptop (inspiron 4150) and I want to buy an external
hard drive so that if my internal hard drive crashes I can easily
obtain all my data from my external hard drive. I'd like to copy not
just my data files but my operating system (XP home edition) and all
my other programs (eg Photoshop, etc). I've read that BootIT NG does
allows you to do this on your external hard drive but I am a novice on
the computer and I'm not familiar with partitions, etc. Is there a
step by step set of instructions somewhere on the internet for
non-techie like me to follow to do this?

Thanks...Mike Salazar
 
What you need is an 'imaging program' such as True Image, Norton Ghost,
BootitNG. These programs will make an exact copy of your system to your
external drive and allow you to make a bootable recovery disk so in the
event of an unrecoverable error you can boot with the disk and recover your
system/data. Of the three programs I noted, I use True Image that is both
efficeint and easy to use. There is no 'best' program, they all do much the
same for all practical purposes, the principal difference being the user
interface.
 
-----Original Message-----
I have a dell laptop (inspiron 4150) and I want to buy an external
hard drive so that if my internal hard drive crashes I can easily
obtain all my data from my external hard drive. I'd like to copy not
just my data files but my operating system (XP home edition) and all
my other programs (eg Photoshop, etc). I've read that BootIT NG does
allows you to do this on your external hard drive but I am a novice on
the computer and I'm not familiar with partitions, etc. Is there a
step by step set of instructions somewhere on the internet for
non-techie like me to follow to do this?

Thanks...Mike Salazar
.Hej
Click to expand...
Try look for the "Norton Ghost" program from Symantic (see
symantic homepage : http://www.symantec.com/index.htm) ,
usually not very expensive and it is doing just the thing
you need it to do. It works for me ,that is !
A fine backup program is Iomega ,
.. (http://www.iomega.com/global/index.jsp) which sometimes
contains the Ghost software too .
..........
 
Maybe you can help me...I am trying to backup my Dell
Dimension desktop using the XP backup utility. I thought
I'd be able to backup just to a series of CDs, but it
doesn't seem to allow me to do this. I don't have an
external hard drive. Do you think I need to have one to do
this?
Thanks.

Vickie
 
While I don't use the WINXP backup utility, I believe I am correct in saying
it does not write directly to a CD or an external drive. You could backup
to your fixed drive then write the file to the CD. The obvious solution is
to load a third party backup program, there are many available, all of which
will allow writing directly to a CD and to external drives.
 
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