Thinkpads Forum

Preparing to pull the trigger on a T520 with SSD. How do you back up the entire machine to give a complete recovery of Windows 7, Applications, Data, etc?

Can this easily be done, with say a Western Digital 500GB Disk Drive and the Lenovo Recovery Utilities?

Dude wrote:Preparing to pull the trigger on a T520 with SSD. How do you back up the entire machine to give a complete recovery of Windows 7, Applications, Data, etc?

Can this easily be done, with say a Western Digital 500GB Disk Drive and the Lenovo Recovery Utilities?

Trouble with using the Lenovo recovery disks is that it sends everything back to factory state, i.e. minus your data and applications and settings.

Why not just image everything to an external HDD using the inbuilt windows 7 imaging program? (don't forget to create a rescue cd also for recovery actions). Otherwise (and maybe also...) you can use the free program "Paragon Backup and recovery 2011" to image.

That sounds fine with me. I am not tied to the Lenovo Utilities, just want a process and tools that is simple and reliable, especially on the recovery side.

What are the steps you have found successful?

1) Make sure you have created a set of Lenovo recovery set of CDs or DVD's (preferable - far fewer!), as last resort recovery-to-factory-state fail-safe. This only needs doing once, as it never changes (factory image)

2) Image your C: drive (including everything) to an external HDD.
[start-control panel-system and security-backup and restore-(i) create a system image (ii) create a system repair disk]
- create new image at least once a month to same place or as often as you feel comfortable with - i.e. with the reality of losing everything new since the last image.

3) get a copy of the free "Paragon Backup and recovery 2011" from http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/index.html. Install, register, and (i) run wizard to image everything to external HDD (ii) create recovery CD (needs to be done once only)
- create new image at least once a month or as often as you feel comfortable - i.e. with the reality of losing everything new since the last image.

4) in the event of a need to use the Lenovo recovery set, or any failure in restoration from the 2 images created and updated regularly, it's best to also have another good clean backed-up alternative copy of all personal files on an external HDD. To do this, you could use the excellent software Synctoy 2.1 (free) from Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/d ... d0592d8c52.
(as these self-created or self-stored files are generally the most irreplaceble of all, have at least 2 copies of these on at least 2 distinct media - preferably in at least two different physical locations- backup media can also fail or be stolen or be destroyed

Here's another tip for you:

Get your SSD from a different source than Lenovo.
It will be faster, and it will be cheaper.
Use Intel for best reliability, and something with a SandForce controller for the best speed.
All SSD's fail less than hard drives do, anyways ("worst" company has 3% return rate compared to 5% with hard drives)

Make the recovery disks from the 250GB hard drive that ships, and use that to install Windows 7 on your new SSD.

Then, just use the backup utility that Lenovo has (Windows has one too) for backups.