My current laptop is a Win7 machine and I am using the backup and restore function that is part of Win7 to an external hard drive. Now suppose something serious happened to my laptop which couldn't be fixed and I had to buy a new laptop which naturally would come with Windows 8, would I be able to restore my files from my external hard drive? Thanks in advance.
Not really. Besides driver problems you would have no way to activate that system (assuming it is a preinstalled OEM version).
But with the help of a couple of cheap OEM programs, you can tune Windows 8 to nearly look like Windows 7.
Thanks for the reply. What I should have perhaps mentioned is that, in the above scenario, I'm only interested in restoring my personal files: pictures, music, documents (doc. odt. spreadsheets, etc.). I get the feeling that the only sure way of safeguarding these personal files would be to manually copy them every couple of days from my c: to my external hard drive.
You can copy them also from the image. Attach the VHD of the image (Action button top left in Disk Management) and the image will show as a volume in Computer. That you can open like any volume and copy from it.
Quote