What’s the best way to do this?

Preferably something that does it regularly and prompts me. I’ve got a big ol’ external hard drive ready. Ideally, and I don’t know if it’s possible but I’d like to be able to do a snapshot with all my progs and stuff. Last time I had a hdd failure it took AGES to reinstall everything back to how it was.

I use a thing called Synctoy to backup other partitions, media collections etc, but it’s not automated and I’d like to use Windows backup as well. ‘Belt and braces’ and all that.

🙂

Bumpin’ for the day-geeks 😉

Windows 8.1 has the system image backup tool which should be able to create an image file for you to restore should anything go wrong in the future.

It will only restore to the same machine though so no good if your machine breaks and needs restoring to different hardware.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

Right, thanks somouk.

What does everyone else do? I’m new to this backing-up lark. I was always that annoying guy who never backed up anything for decades. Three recent catastrophic failures have changed my thinking somewhat.

jambourgie – Member
What does everyone else do? I’m new to this backing-up lark. I was always that annoying guy who never backed up anything for decades. Three recent catastrophic failures have changed my thinking somewhat.

Buy crashplan family pack, install it on all your devices and back up to their servers.

I’ve got ~4TB backed up there now. It works pretty well, although upload can be a bit slow. It also will automate backup to external hard drives, or even your friends computers if they run the client.