I recently had a hard drive fail in my PC. I replaced the hard drive and spent several hours installing Windows, all the updates, applications, printers, scanner and data. I do not wish to go through that again.
I would like to plug an external hard drive into the computer and have a system backup done every night. I have a few questions.
1. I have a 500 GB hard drive in the computer so I plan to use a 500 GB external hard drive. I want the system backup to occur every night. Does most system backup software know to just overwrite the previous night's backup?
2. I have 320GB of used space on the PC. How long can I expect a system backup to take? Will the time vary much depending on the software I use?
3. What software works best for this? I have a Dell PC with Dell Backup and Recovery already installed but it says I need the premium version to do a system backup. I have looked at Norton Ghost and Acronis as well. My PC is running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit if that matters.
4. If my hard drive fails, how do I mirror the data back from the external hard drive to the new internal drive? Can I just boot from the external drive and then open the backup software to run a command to mirror it back?
Any help is appreciated.
I would like to plug an external hard drive into the computer and have a system backup done every night. I have a few questions.
1. I have a 500 GB hard drive in the computer so I plan to use a 500 GB external hard drive. I want the system backup to occur every night. Does most system backup software know to just overwrite the previous night's backup?
2. I have 320GB of used space on the PC. How long can I expect a system backup to take? Will the time vary much depending on the software I use?
3. What software works best for this? I have a Dell PC with Dell Backup and Recovery already installed but it says I need the premium version to do a system backup. I have looked at Norton Ghost and Acronis as well. My PC is running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit if that matters.
4. If my hard drive fails, how do I mirror the data back from the external hard drive to the new internal drive? Can I just boot from the external drive and then open the backup software to run a command to mirror it back?
Any help is appreciated.