Recommend software to clone w510 500gig drive to USB external drive?

[DLDavis]

Would like to clone the drive that currently resides in my w510, and save the image to a 2TB Toshiba drive so that I can restore all my software in the event of a drive crash. Can this be done? If so, what software is safe to use...and do I have to "register" that software on the net b4 I can use it? If so, that's a deal killer for me.

[theterminator93]

Clonezilla is free, although there is a little learning curve to it. You can go disk-disk, disk-image, or image-disk. You can read/write images to locally connected media (via SATA/IDE/USB) or access a network share. You can download a live CD to burn here: http://clonezilla.org/downloads/downloa ... nch=stable

[DLDavis]

Clonezilla is free, although there is a little learning curve to it. You can go disk-disk, disk-image, or image-disk. You can read/write images to locally connected media (via SATA/IDE/USB) or access a network share. You can download a live CD to burn here: http://clonezilla.org/downloads/downloa ... nch=stable

Thanks...do you know if it has the capacity to encrypt the backup copy?

[nangryo]

acronis work wonderfully. You don't even need to install them on your pc. Just install them on your friend or other pc, make bootable usb acronis, then boot from there and backup you harddisk

[theterminator93]

Clonezilla is free, although there is a little learning curve to it. You can go disk-disk, disk-image, or image-disk. You can read/write images to locally connected media (via SATA/IDE/USB) or access a network share. You can download a live CD to burn here: http://clonezilla.org/downloads/downloa ... nch=stable

Thanks...do you know if it has the capacity to encrypt the backup copy?

I'm not certain, but I don't believe so.