Restoring External Drives?

jack1953 said:

Can Windows 7 restore an external drive? If so, how? If not, any program out there that can?
Thanks,
Jack

I haven't tried it but I believe that programs like Acronis Home image will create an image of an external drive and then restore it. I know that I have done it for my separate D drive on my Laptop. There might be a couple of free ones out there that will do this also.

Rich

With free Macrium you can image and restore any drive or partition. With Windows imaging you are very restricted. I would not use that.

Based on past experience, I would really want to make sure that the image did work correctly with any program. give it a shot and try to restore to a 3rd external hard disk to give yourself a warm fuzzy. Especially if the data that your backing up is critical. Sometimes just copying the data to another device works great.

Rich

Rich has a good point. Trying it out before always helps - especially to make yourself familiar with the recovery procedure which is usually not well documented.

I use a little 2GB test partition for that. You can shrink that off any large partition. Put some odd data in and image it. Then delete some data from the test partition and restore it from the image. If your deleted data is back, you know that it works.

Using a small 2GB partition has the advantage that the whole procedure will be very fast. Using free Macrium, the imaging step takes only 4 seconds.