[Brennen Kinch]

Hi everyone so here soon I will be getting a 2 TB external USB hard drive and I’m going to use it to try to back up my computer my question is does anybody know if there’s a way that I can back up my entire system meaning files system files Windows files just the entire system to this hard drive so that if my computer ever crashes or whatever and I have to restore it I can just hook this device up to my computer and be able to restore as normal any help with this would be appreciated thanks

[TeamKomando:John]

Hello Brennen,

Thanks for visiting us on the forums with such a great question. You can utilize a free program from Macrium Macrium Relfect Free This program will take a snapshot of your entire disk. The snapshot includes everything from system files to you personal data. I have used this in the past many times for migrating my system to a Solid State Disk from a traditional Spinning Hard Disk Drive. You can even schedule backups with the free version.

You will need an additional USB thumb drive 16GB should suffice, if you ever had to perform a restore to your main disk, you can find directions here on that part.

[Brennen Kinch]

OK awesome that sounds like exactly what I wanna do I wanna basically save my system so that if I ever have to restore my computer again like I had to do a couple of months ago because of windows i’ll be able to do what I need to do and then be able to act like nothing happened as quickly as possible LOL
Real quick question though so you said I need a flash drive but I already have a solid-state 2 TB hard drive that I just got do I need both the hard drive and the flash drive or can I use just the hard drive I guess I’m not understanding exactly what the flash drive is for thank you so much for your help and being so kind and understanding about the questions

[TeamKomando:John]

You can think of the flash drive like a bootable CD/DVD-ROM, if you wanted to restore your system backup of your c:\ (which would be saved on your 2TB external) you can’t boot your computer from the C:\ and perform the restore because it is in use.

Booting the the Macrium USB drive will boot a temporary operating system that is capable of reading the stored image from your 2TB external and have the ability to restore the data to your computers internal disk c:\

Let us know if you have any other questions.

[Author]

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