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What is the best method to backup my C/D partitioned drive
Sorry everyone, be prepared to be bored once again.
Backups, imaging, rescue disks, restoring. All very confusing. Have been reading through all of the posts trying to glean info.
At the moment l have a partitioned C/D drive (60gb/440gb) and an E drive (500gb).
The C partition contains the W7 OS (pretty damn obvious!) plus all of my programs which have all been free downloads. There are no personal files on there, and if l lost all of the programs, then so be it, l'll just download them all again. That'll be quite easy to do.
However, l've made numerous tweeks to W7 and also to both my IE and FF browsers so losing everything will need a lot of donkey work to get it all back.
The D partition, believe it or not, is empty, but my 'E' drive contains everything (ie Music, Films, data files etc).
I suppose what l could do is to COPY all of the important data from 'E' to 'D' so if 'E' fails, at least all of the data is safe on the 'D' drive.
It's the 'C' drive that concerns me, so went into the W7 backup and restore. Created a system repair disk which worked fine, and then tried to create a system image of the 'C' drive which cancelled as it couldn't fit it on to the dvd disk? I would have thought it should ask for a next disk to be inserted, but it didn't! Have also found out that l should save both 'C' and 'D' as it will restore both to how they should be.
Anyway, with me so far? Sorry to be a bore!
There's loads of posts on here but a couple in the sticky's are for Macrium. Don't know whether this will do the trick or not. Whatever the replies, the free version doesn't include files and folders backup. Didn't understand that as if it's an ISO image, surely everything will be restored?
Also don't understand that if l save the ISO image to my E drive, then how do l boot from it?
I would have thought that you change the bios to boot from 'E' but then if the ISO is with loads of other files, can this be selected (or does the rescue disk sort this out).
Blimey, l'm rambling on too much (sorry).
Bottom line is that if my 'C/D' drive fails, how do l get it all back. I've never had to do this before, so it's all pretty new to me.
Regards