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need to back up a hd

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kenshin-dono:
so im finally sending my laptop out for repair. Found out that they had actually extended the warranty because of a lawsuit against the Nvidia graphic card that was in it

Anyway, I was wondering what I should use to completely back up the HD. They'll probably have to wipe it. I bought a Hitatchi turo external HD to back it up to. I dont think the sofware on it is really all that great though. what i read sounds like i can just do some kinda scheduled partial backups. Anyone know if there is a good free program to do a complete backup of an entire hardrive? Also, i hear about imaging a HD, but dont really know what that is.. should i try to do that, or just do a regular old straight copy? I need to do it in the next day or two, im running an error check on it right now with HDtune

^_^x KD

kitamesume:
...

"copy & paste", technically embedded to any OS known to date.

backing up an OS and installing it to a different device(possibly instead of giving you your unit back they'd send a refurbished one) will not work. so yea, you only need to backup the files that are needed.

Bob2004:

--- Quote from: kitamesume on January 09, 2012, 06:10:12 AM ---backing up an OS and installing it to a different device(possibly instead of giving you your unit back they'd send a refurbished one) will not work. so yea, you only need to backup the files that are needed.

--- End quote ---

Actually, depending on the version of Windows, it might well work. If the hardware in the laptop they send back is roughly the same as you have now, then in theory it should work absolutely fine. And even if there are a few differences with certain pieces of hardware (eg. graphic card), it should still work. It's only if the motherboard/cpu are different that mirroring the drive wouldn't work, in theory. In fact, with Windows Vista/7, even if the motherboard is different, it should still, in theory work fine. And, since it recovers everything, it has the advantage of making sure you don't forget to backup some important file (which always happens to me).

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a tool for completely backing up your entire hard disk which can then be used to restore Windows later. It's in control panel -> backup & restore -> create a system image. You can then use a Windows install cd to load it onto the laptop once you get it back.

If it turns out that you aren't able to get your recovered image to work properly on your replacement laptop (which is quite possible), then you can still use the recovery image to access all your files manually as though you just copy/pasted them (though there are a couple of extra steps, it's nothing complicated - see here for instructions).

kitamesume:
theres one thing that always fucked up that theory when i do it, machines have a certain code that gets registered in the registry, trying to move the OS would make a bigger mess than going for a fresh install, well since backing up and reapplying kinda as fast as going for a clean install... you know what happened next.

but sure, i've seen some do it successfully, just that doing it myself haven't been successful at all XD

datora:
.

--- Quote from: kenshin-dono on January 09, 2012, 04:50:14 AM ---I was wondering what I should use to completely back up the HD.
--- End quote ---

Acronis.  This can create a perfect image of a drive, which can then be imaged back to the computer and it will run exactly like it did at the moment the image was created.  Copies abound at the Bay of Pirates.

However, several drive manufacturers provide free versions for use with their products.  Western Digital, for example:

 - http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

As long as one Western Digital drive is detected on your system it will work for free, even imaging one drive to another of manufacturers other than Western Digital (for example, I imaged a source Samsung drive to an Hitachi drive because a completely uninvolved Western Digital drive was detected in an external case over a USB port).  Read the user manual that you can download in *.pdf.  You should be ready to image your drive in about 30 minutes or less.  Can take several hours for the image to be created depending on amount of data on the source drive and connection speed (I try not to use USB 2.0 for drives with over ~250 GB data on them, for example).


If you just want to back up data & don't care about the OS or installed programs, I have mine organized into directories and just copy the directories.  Pre-Win7, it used to be easy to copy your user profile &/or My Documents folder.  Win7 has made that a royal pain in the ass now, changing the structure of that and hiding it behind it's "libraries" concept.

If your data isn't well-organized, a drive image might be your best option.  The image you make can still be read as a remote storage device and you can slowly crawl through the drive and copy everything back that's important once you get your laptop back.  Last year I had three drives fail as boot drives, but slapped each one into an external case and have been able to check & copy directory by directory to recover all the important data, even though all my installed software was lost.

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