How to backup windows 10 laptop?

Wow that is amazing. Okay so when i look at my pc it shows


local disk


42gb free of 232gb total


But there is also a drive that says


New Volume E

29.7gb free of 29.8gb


That is an internal drive right? When i first got this laptop dell xps 15 9550, there was some other small ssd in it. This is it right?


So if i want to do what you did, how long would it take me? But the volume E is another drive so i have 2 partitions?


The thing is few years ago when i first got this laptop, there was a problem it. Whatever i downloaded first, it went to the new volume drive but the issue was windows 10 was installed there. So for some reason, i couldnt download any programs. Does that make sense? I went to a repair shop first and they fixed it and made my 250gb ssd the primary drive. The way the computer came, they made the small 32gb ssd the primary drive? Does that make sense? I just recalled when i got this laptop few years ago, they had this mistake where everything went to the the other drive.


Can you tell from what i described? There are 2 devices and drives. One is local disk c and one is new volume E. Do you want me to take a pic of it or you understand what i mean.

Note the majority of people on this forum use Macrium Reflect Free. There is a paid for version if you need advance features which I suspect you don't.

Its best if you post a screen shot and then we can see what you have got.

Type Create and Format into the Windows search box and you should see this come up (first image).

Click on the application and it will open to this (second image). Post a shot of this screen.

People have given you far too many complex options, just for clarity:

1) Have a USB drive connected, let's say one of those 1-4 TB portable ones.
2) Download an Imaging application such as Macrium free (Windows 10 itself does not have a reliable way).
3) Install Macrium.
4) You run Macrium and make an Image of all Partitions/drives to that USB drive. It will be in one large Macrium file.

Notes:
The Imaging process will take some hours assuming mechanical HDDs. Maybe 2-4 hours very approx.
Restoring your Laptop from that Image it will be the same as just before you did the Image, takes roughly the same amount of time.

"that is having the windows computer as exactly how it was before? thus everything on desktop icon is there, when you click start menu, it has all the programs you previously installed?"
Yes.

"Well if you copy and paste, thats pretty simple. You just copy the file and then paste or drag it onto your external hard drive."
Just carry on doing this, maybe make a Folder for these and another Folder for your Macrium images on the external USB drive.

Macrium
Quite hard to use initially, even the download is a bit tricky with confusing tick boxes.
Becomes much easier after a few goes.

Once you know how to use Macrium better you can just extract user files from the Image.

The tutorials on here are good, but makes it seem vastly more complex than it really is.

helmut yes that is what if find frustrating about this. There are so many directions and its very complex for someone like me.


From discussing what i want, which is basically an exact copy of windows 10, there is no simple step by step guide by posted anywhere online where you have many ppl say... this is the best and most simplest guide ever?


I will post a screenshot of it mooly and let me know what you think.


So you mention macrium but the other poster mentions AOMEI. Then you say it takes 2-4 hours... but the AOMEI takes 15 minutes?

paulyjustin said:

So you mention macrium but the other poster mentions AOMEI. Then you say it takes 2-4 hours... but the AOMEI takes 15 minutes?

How long is a piece of string? It very much depends on the speed of your processor, the speed of your usb connection to the drive you put the image on (USB2? USB3?) and just how much used space there is on the drive(s) being imaged.

As a guide, my System One in my specs below has an Intel Pentium, 265GB of used space, and only has USB2 ports. A full Macrium image to an external HDD (including verification after creating the image) took 4 hours.

Another of my machines has an i7 cpu, 224GB of files and USB3 ports. A full Macrium image plus verification took 1 hour 27 minutes.

Yet another machine just has an Intel Atom and usb2 ports, but at just 14GB to image it took 20 minutes to image and verify.

paulyjustin said:

helmut yes that is what if find frustrating about this. There are so many directions and its very complex for someone like me.

I wonder if this will help the frustration...

AOMEI and Macrium Reflect both create Images (snapshots) of the entire system
- all software, passwords, licences, everything, bit for bit
They both back up only the occupied sectors of the disk. Neither of them wastes time on unoccupied space. They operate at a disk Volume level, so do not need to follow all the individual files and folder in a running system.
Both can be scheduled to run unattended, and can wake the computer from sleep to run at night if you wish. And, if you need to, you can continue working while a backup is running.


Of course, both are out of date as soon as you create a new file or change an existing file
So I back up my personal data quite separately, onto the same external disk drive.
Personally I find File History meets my needs - see below.

I'm familiar with Macrium Reflect free which can create either a Full image or a Differential image. A differential image is smaller and faster because it records only all the changes since the previous full backup. No doubt AOMEI can do the same. The paid for version offers smaller, faster "Incremental" backups - another variant; see the product manuals.

I run an image only once a month, and File history runs automatically in between times
Here are some numbers which may help a bit.

A full backup of the 76GB actually used in my 1TB HDD + 60GB SSD took 17 minutes to a USB3 external disk.
A later full backup of 106GB took 23 minutes and created a 90GB image file of all 5 partitions.
A typical differential wrote only 9GB of changes and took 9 minutes to run.
Bigger differentials obviously take longer, but for me the benefit is saving space on backup.
I find the extra size of these differentials is mainly caused by Windows Updates
I'm not planning on having to recover, but I know I CAN if I have to.

In between times, File History backs up my personal data.
It takes copies of individual files more or less as I save them.
FH has facilities to recover previous versions of a file or recover a deleted or a corrupt file.
There's bags of info about FH on the web
It has NOT been pulled by MSoft, tho there have been rumours of this (not yet, at least!)

Both my Images and File History are saved in different folders on the same external USB3 disk, so, apart from fire or theft, I have two entire independent copies of all mysoftware and data and licences and passwords.

Reflect has enough space to back up several generations.
File History records changes to individual files more or less as you make them.
My busiest folder has versions going back a year. The latest instance on FH mirrors the current contents.


I feel reasonably secure - that's what Backup and Recovery is all about

Good luck with your decision.
I reckon this is the best forum for good advice.
Those tutorials by Brink are just something else

Hi,
You can follow the following post:
How to make a full backup of your Windows 10 PC | Windows Central