I’ve just recently gotten a external hard drive which is;
Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB.
My laptop’s (currently the only PC I own) hard drive is only 160 GB. However for some reasons, I’ve always eventually suffers some severe slowdown over time after a fresh install. So I’ve been reinstalling XP every few months and it is becoming more of a pain lately because one of my drivers file became corrupted.
So here is my plan with the external hard drive.
1)set aside 160-170 GB to create an restore partition that is an exact copy of my laptop hard drive when I have all of the programs, updates, and drivers set up.
2)use the remaining GB for generic storage like family pictures, blender3d projects, and the like.
However, I don’t have much experience with external hard drive and backing up like this so I’m hoping that someone here could help explains how to do this properly so I don’t accidentally lose my files or partition later on down the road.
Right now I only have 10 GB total of USB drive (1x4GB & 3x2GB). hopefully I can set up the restore partition thing properly so I can save all of the BBB, Elephant Dream, & Hey Frankie! and other similiar files to my laptop hard drive and the restore partition so I can always keep it on utorrent to seed it. I can also defidently use the external hard drive to store all of the vid tutorials and tutorials files too
and a back up is created as an archive so it takes up far less space. it seems like you are wanting something like a restore back up, to reset your pc to how it used to be. you can actually use dvds for that, that way if a lighting stirke too out your pc and external drive you would still have all your data safe on the disks. here is a professional guide that should answer all your questions http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1124&page=1 how to create backsups useing xps backup program starts on page 3 if you want to use that.
and if it is happening all the time you should get a good anti virus and anti spyware program like avast or avg and run it.
That guide looks pretty thorough I’m currently reading it right now but I have 2 questions real quick.
when I make an exact copy of my hard drive with the program, will the copy itself be in a image file so I don’t have to partition my external hard drive?
could I make the hard drive bootable in the event I have to restore my laptop with the image? and still be able to use the extra available memory to store other files?
I might find the answer in that guide but in case I miss it or it is simply not there, I hope these questions may be answered thanks again for the guide and link to the software. I haven’t downloaded the software yet I intend to do that after reading the guide.
I can only use free software for now. I spent all of my pc budget on the external hard drive and want to save the rest of the budget to upgrade my laptop ram from 2GB to 4GB.
