There are many drive image/cloning programs available, including Windows 7 Backup, but I thought I’d try a free option which should work on any system – Clonezilla.
It’s available as a free ISO download at
http://clonezilla.org/
After burning the new disk and making sure your computer will boot from the CD/DVD drive, attach your external backup, reboot your computer and follow the prompts.
This is a bit of an old school program and doesn’t have the nice GUI interface that other programs have. There’s a video below which will walk you through the process.
The main thing is that you first choose your backup location, so make sure you can identify you USB drive when all the drives are listed. I also prefer to create a Clonezilla folder ahead of time so that I know where I want all my Clonezilla backups located on the backup drive.
On my laptop, Clonezilla backed up and checked the backup in about three hours. The 206gb of data was compressed to 138gb on the external drive.
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