Backing up system files using My Book

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hello All,

Here’s the situation. What I want is to have a backup copy of my whole computer on an external hard drive and also have a seperate system bootable external or internal drive (if I could have that all on 1 drive I would rather that). The external hard drive will be stored elsewhere and just brought out whenever I feel like connecting it so it can auto back up again. I don’t want to copy and paste every time as I have folders everywhere and just want it to store any new files, to update modified or moved files, but not to delete any files I have deleted from my computer (is this possible?).

So I went and bought a 1TB WD My Book Essential to backup my system because it says it will auto-backup which saves me getting a separate program to try and manage this. The problem is it only does the files it wants and won’t do any system files. This means I have to know EXACTLY what it hasn’t backed up in order to make sure I don’t miss out anything when I make the bootable drive which would be a nightmare.

I am also on XP at the moment and changing to Windows 7 very soon and don’t want to lose all of my stuff if it isn’t going to work between both operating systems as a simple cut/paste back into the new system.

I don’t know if what I am expecting is way off from what should happen and would just like to know what my options are.  Is there any way to get this to do what I want or should I just go swap it over for a simple external drive and third party software?

Any help would be awesome.

Cheers

MAS  

2

Smartware backsup with it’s own method. For third party software there is this http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en I use the paid version. The best way to back up the whole system is to make the rescue disk and boot from that. It runs from a linux app and eliminates problems like automatic updates or scheduled things like defrag from happening while making the image. It’s not connected to web so no antivirus or security software will be running either. Macrium and Paragon also make free backup grograms that are highly regarded. Any of these freebies don’t have all of the fancy options. I partition my drive so the system and programs are on one and my data is on the other and make a separate image of each. I also use another external and do manual backups pf data.

Remember never trust important data to just one physical drive internal or external. The board is full of people who did and are moaning they lost everything.

Joe