Quote:
Originally Posted by matt
Hi all.
One of our laptops at home is showing signs of being on the way out.
We're wondering whether anyone can recommend some good freeware to back-up our files/programs, or even make a complete copy of our HDD?
Cheers.
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Matt, besides all of the advice above, based on your statement "signs of being on the way out" I'm assuming you fear the hard drive is failing (not the PC in general).
If that is the case, I would get the trial version of "Boot It NG". It is free, and you can make an entire disk image (save to CD, DVD, external USB device - and it will automatically span across CD/DVDs), and have a complete image of it. It installs as a boot partition, hence it all works completely outside the windows environment, hence you get EVERYTHING on the hard drive.
Buy yourself a replacement hard drive (doesn't have to be the same size - can be bigger capacity if your laptop can handle it), and then just restore the image back. You won't even know it's on a new hard drive (other than probably being faster and more space as newer drives tend to be)
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com
Note that it's only function (besides being a good "image backup" solution), is really a partition management tool/boot manager. It is a tiny bit "techie" but if you're doing it as a once-off to just move hard drives, can't go past it as it is miniscule and very good at what it does. If you're someone who wants to run different OSs, it is a fantastic little boot manager too.
Turbo