can I make an exact copy of my computer

Hi everyone, i'm new to this sort of thing, so please be gentle. I've moved home, computer arrived, but the box with all the discs etc are lost, win 7, malwarebytes (lifetime), eset etc. Can I make a copy of everything using Acronis for example to a external hd, and then buy a new bigger internal hd and copy it back to that, and then run as before?

Hi, thanks RolandJS for the reply. I've moved to France and all the computer shops here want to do is sell me a new win10 machine, ha, ha. So if I am right--- use Acronis to make a clone (copy) of my complete hd, including the OS onto an external hd. Then replace the old hd, 500 gb almost full, with a 1tb, then copy from the external to the new. Then get another external and onto this make full imge backup and regular backups. Hope i'm right, at my age,74, the grey cells are a bit worn out.

You need to watch the partitions size there is an option that will grow the old one to the full TB drive. It's a time consuming way of doing it simple clone the drive to the new one that takes half the time and less risk of corruption

Hi Samuria, thanks to you also. Does this mean that I put the new drive in place, then with Acronis just copy from one to the other, then take the old drive out?

You can, and should, make an exact copy of your hard drive onto an external hard drive using backup software. Many people use Macrium Reflect Free, Acronis, Aoemi Backupper, and other after-market programs for this purpose. Be sure to create the backup program's emergency boot disk after you have installed the backup software on your computer.

You can then remove your hard drive, install a new, bigger hard drive, then restore the backup that you made onto the new hard drive. You will need to boot the computer with the emergency boot disk in order to do this.

Once you have successfully done the restore, not only will you have a bigger hard drive, but you will have verified that your backup was successful and can be used to do a restore. Also, the original drive is now a full backup of your computer.

Put the original hard drive into the anti-static bag that the new drive came in, and store it in a safe place. In case anything goes wrong, you can always put it back into the computer and be up and running immediately.

Be sure to do periodic backups to the external hard drive, so that in case something goes wrong, you can easily fix it by doing a restore.

Hi, mrjimphelps, thanks for the detailed reply. I now feel a lot better and more confident. As you say, any future problems should be fairly easy to put right. Would any of you care to say which backup software to use, not based on price, but on perhaps ease of use?

My thanks to all you kind souls out there, I think that I will go down the route posted by mrjimphelps as this gives me a safety net for the future. So thanks to the nice careless removal men I have learnt something---Backup!!! My thanks again for your help.

My personal favorite is Macrium Reflect Free. It is very sufficient for backing up the computers you have at home. Best of all: I have successfully done two restores with Macrium Reflect Free.

There's also Macrium Reflect (paid version). This is the Macrium you use if you are in a commercial (not home) setting. I've never used the paid version.

Many years ago I used Acronis, EaseUS Todo Backup, and Seagate DiscWizard. I didn't like these programs for various reasons - perhaps they have improved over the years.

I've also used Norton Ghost. For bare metal, no frills backups, there was nothing better than Ghost. Unfortunately, Ghost is out of production.

Years ago, there was another program I used for daily backups -- Memeo. Memeo was not a traditional backup program, but rather it would automatically make a backup copy of any files you made changes to, so that if you needed to, you could revert back to a previous version of that file. (For example, if you inadvertently deleted a file, you could recover a previous version of it from the Memeo archive.) I haven't used Memeo in about 10 years, but back then, it was a fantastic program.