Can I mirror my internal HD to an External HD?

S

Smudge

New Member
I will be buying a new laptop in the near future. The internal HD on the new laptop will probably be 120GB. Not being all that familiar with this kind of stuff I would appreciate any information that anyone can provide. I would like to backup my entire laptop to an external HD and I have some questions:

1. Would it be possible to backup EVERYTHING onto an Ext HD (Operating System, all programs and all data)? If so, is this practical - I just really want to ensure that in the event of the internal HD crashed I had copies of all programs (music, photos, Palm Desktop data Software and other software apps that I have the disks to).

2. How does one restore data from an Ext HD after an internal HD crash?

3. Seeing that my internal HD is going to be 120GB what do I need to get as far as size for the External HD (I have about 20GB of programs and data at the most to load onto the new laptop)?

4. Can I just do my backups every few days or does it have to be continually connected to a USB port?

5. How prone are Ext HD's to viruses and crashing? If it is common for Ext HD's to crash should I consider another backup method as backing up data and programs is the only reason why I am looking into this option.

THanks in advance so much for any feedback!
 
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1. Totally possible with a program like Ghost(and probably others, perhaps better ones...but I don't know any off hand...)

2. Ghost has some client that can be loaded from a CD or something like that.

3. It depends... I wouldn't recommend this but some imaging programs such as ghost offer compression tools. But for the most part, just as much space as you're using. I'd at least get the same sized HD. If not so you could backup a full HD, so you could store other misc items on it.

4. This question should be pretty obvious :P Besides, a full backup as you're talking about isn't exactly a fast process...

5. No more or less than internal, besides the fact that it could be disconnected if the computer is infected.
 
Yes, you can backup everything to an external HDD. I do it every time I install new apps once I'm certain there's no surprises. The best program for the money is GHOST. But the OS and most apps won't run from a backup copy without re-installing them ghost or something similar. External HDDs are not immune to viruses but they can be disconnected, which I recommend whenever you're on the internet and especially if you download and install anything. I've never had an external HDD crash, so I couldn't tell you how prone they are, but then I never take them anywhere, and the only time I have one connected to the usb port is when I'm actually creating a backup or ghosting my c: drive. I have a second external drive for media but I won't get into that here.
 
to be extra safe i would also do a backup to dvd put it somewere safe that way if your backup to the external hdd gets corrupted you will have the dvds to fall back on.
 
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