Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

I Strongly Recommend a program called Macrium Reflect (Free for Private use). You can CLONE your HDD to an external USB or SATA disk, AND create a bootable Macrium recovery disk containing your current OS Including all your RAID and other drivers. IF disaster strikes, boot the computer with the recovery CD, connect to your external back-up disk, and restore your computer. EVERYTHING will be there - programs, passwords, registries, and yes - GREMLINS, depending on the age of your backup. Macrium also contains some HDD recovery options which are MUCH more competent than ANYTHING microsxxt offers with their OS recovery options (MS can't figure out which partition the boot sector should link to - - Macrium had no such problem and recovered my installation).
I have several spare HDD - clone my system disk (512 GB) every month or so. Data drive is synced to an external array about that often. E-Mail PST file backed up every day.

was_a_guru

I bought two internal HDs that are the same size as my C: drive (1TB). I installed them in a SATA to USB enclosure (Sabrent). On a biweekly basis I alternately clone my C: drive to one of the enclosures. If my C: drive gets corrupted or crashes I can replace it with the most recently cloned drive (after removing it from the enclosure), and I’m up and running again. Worst case I’ve lost two weeks of data (but actually I back up to the cloud new/changed files daily). So no need to reinstall any programs. If the C: was just corrupted then I can clone back to it and it becomes one of my biweekly backups. If it had crashed then dispose of it and buy a new one for the backups.

This saved me several times over the years.

FiddleMaker Loc: Merrimac, MA

Gene, so it is the hard drive you replace and not the entire entire computer - if I am reading your reply correctly. I have one of these all-in-one computers but I do run a small fan that cools the rear of the computer to keep it cool.

was_a_guru

Correct. I have a HP Laptop and can access the C: drive from the bottom of the laptop by unscrewing a couple of screws. There are probably some smaller computers/laptops where that might not be easy or even possible. I actually replaced my C: HD with an SSD about a year or so ago. The improvement in performance is impressive.

11bravo

I too highly recommend Macrium Reflect, having both the paid and free versions (paid pack for my own computers, free for computers I support). A full image is everything on your HDD, including programs, keys, everything. When, not if, a HDD fails, just restore to a new HDD. As long as you are restoring to the same hardware, except for the HDD, easy (different hardware another question). I've actually restored to the same HDD when a configuration change didn't go as planned, easier to restore than backtrack. Windows update fails, don't rely on system restore - use an image backup.

Free version does full and differences, paid includes incrementals (Google to learn what each is). Macrium Reflect is a must have program for me. Backing up individual folders is fine, but when real trouble comes along, IMAGE backups will save your a**.

FiddleMaker Loc: Merrimac, MA

Thanks for posting. I really need to look into this.