Hi guys,
I have just bought a 40GB External HDD to backup my laptop to. There is around 19GB of info on my laptop.
Anyway, can someone talk me through what i should do. So i can make the most of my backup. I was thinking of of doing a clone of my current drive to it, Is that sensible ?.
Can anyone recommend a good clone program i can use (preferebly free).
If at some time i upgrade my PC will i be able to pick and choose my files off it ?

Thanks in advance.

Hi PC-Power,

Cloning your laptop is a good idea, but let's be sure your doing it for the right reasons. The best software I've used for cloning is Acronis. It's rare to find a decent free cloning tool, let alone one that works as well as Acronis.

Cloning should be used in a situation where you have complex installation of software on your PC, where it would be difficult if not impossible to install from scratch. Cloning can take time and would be a pointless excercise if you made a single change to a document, and wanted a backup of that document.

If it's just individual files you want to backup then it's probably a better idea to do a manual copy of these documents over to your HDD. Just a simple, right click on the file you want to copy, and then right click and paste it onto your HDD. Simple! No software needed. Quick, and you have much more space to play with on your external HDD. You backed up files can then be access from any PC you plug your external drive into.

I was thinking of getting a new PC or update my hard drive, that's partly why i was thinking of cloning. I was wondering though, if i make a clone, then try it in another PC, will i be able to pick files i want off of it.
Another thing is that my PC is essential to me for what i do. So in the event of a crash, it would need to be up and running fairly quickly in near enough the state it was in before it crashed. This is why i was siding with the cloning option. The amount of changes there are to my PC, I could probably get away with a backup once every 3 months, without there being any devastating disruption in the event of a crash.
Thanks for your comments mate, they're all taken on board.
If anyone else knows of any good cloning software, i'd appreciate the help.

Cheers.

In that case, cloning would be ideal, and you could have you PC up and running again within a hour using Acronis. Other tools vary.

The only thing is that you will not be able to restore your drive onto a different PC. Windows will only work on the PC it is originally installed on, unless the hardware (i.e. motherboard), is very very similar or identical.

Right, but would it be possible to attach the cloned drive without using it to boot from to a different already up and running PC and view and copy the files cloned on it ?

You can view and copy files (not most software) yep.

There are normally two options when using software like this.

1st) is an image file. This is a single file that contains the entire contents (and in some cases, the partition information) of your drive. These can be compressed down so that you can backup many copy's and more easily restore them when you need them.

2nd) is a duplicate. An exact copy of your existing HDD.

Use the second option if you would like to view the files. Try not to make folders private or use file security software as you may have some difficulty accessing them later.