Hard drive back up

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bripics

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Brian
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I have a external hard drive and I want to copy my laptop hard drive incase it crashes what is the best software and even better are there any free ones :)
 
Comodo provide a free backup software for windows. It works pretty well. Otherwise, you could use something like ghost to make a drive image. I've not used any of the ghost tools and can't recommend anything.
 
I use Carbonite online backup, and although I've not had a major crisis, when I have needed to restore a few files it has saved the day. Also it's cheap.

It does have disadvantages.

i) For quite a while my laptop was running slow and crashing, and miraculously, when I uninstalled Carbonite - problem solved. Since the re-install, it has been running well.

2) It does not back-up external drives. I keep all my recent files on the internal HD, only moving files over to the external drive when they are also safely backed up elsewhere.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy with it.
 
I like SyncBackSE. There is also a freeware version available further down the page.

EDIT - Scratch that, I thought the OP was asking about file backups as opposed to drive backups. I'd agree that Acronis would be a good solution.
 
You can do it through windows it self. No need to pay out to do it.
 
pampers said:
You can do it through windows it self. No need to pay out to do it.
Click to expand...

But you still have to reinstall the operating system and all your applications before you can get at your data - take hours, something like acronis will take about 10 mins and your back to the same state where you were when you last took a backup
 
Dogfish_magnet said:
But you still have to reinstall the operating system and all your applications before you can get at your data - take hours, something like acronis will take about 10 mins and your back to the same state where you were when you last took a backup
Click to expand...

Assuming you are using Vista this isn't actually true. I use the Windows backup program regularly and recently had my system drive die on me. Installed the new drive and using the Vista DVD chose to reinstate using the backup. not only did do just that, it partitioned the drive into C:\ and D:\ (like before) at the correct sizes. From opening the parcel with the new drive, to being operational took about 20 minutes.

Anthony.
 
Thanks for to all for replying :thumbs:

I have downloaded the trial version of Acronis True Image just trying to get my head round it...:)
 
I use Symantecs GHOST and then I use incremental backups every night. Works well for me:)
 
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