Mirror backup

[Uncle Dewey]

I will have Backup My PC and am wondering if I can do a total backup of my primary hard drive such that I will be able to use the Windows Folder Explorer to retrieve a file, folder, etc.?

 

Thanks, Uncle Dewey

[Guest ml]

An external hard drive is a good option.

 

You don't have to buy a program to put those folders on a second hard drive. You can do the same thing with a second internal hard drive and in Windows Explorer just drag and drop the folders that you want to save from one drive to the other.

 

There are programs that will create a 'drive image' which is an identical copy of your original hard drive onto a second hard drive without doing any compression and you can open the files using Windows Explorer. I don't thing Backup MyPC will do that, but I'm not certain.

[james_hardin]

No and no other software can do that either!

 

Full backups are compacted and stored is a proprietary file system. You can only extract all or portions by using the Backup programs Recovery portion.

 

Some will allow a 'Disaster Recovery' system, which as the name implies, restores everything that was backed up onto a formatted drive. Otherwise they will allow the individual files to be recovered as long as the Recovery extraction program is installed on the PC.

 

But Explorer will not understand the file system used or have any idea how to uncompress the data into a usable file.

[james_hardin]

An external hard drive is a good option.

 

You don't have to buy a program to put those folders on a second hard drive. You can do the same thing with a second internal hard drive and in Windows Explorer just drag and drop the folders that you want to save from one drive to the other.

 

There are programs that will create a 'drive image' which is an identical copy of your original hard drive onto a second hard drive without doing any compression and you can open the files using Windows Explorer. I don't thing Backup MyPC will do that, but I'm not certain.

 

No it will not, that is why I said that…

[karri]

Hi,

 

I don't know if this can help but I can tell you what I did. I bought an external drive a couple of years ago and used its accompanying software to back up my C drive onto it. There was an option to back up the os and other stuff, but I just backed up my C drive. Every so often I would push a button on the unit and it would update the backup for me. When I got my new computer, I just connected it using the usb cable. Now I can navigate to and retrieve the folders and files that were on my old computer, just as if it were just another drive on my current computer (drag and drop, open and save as, etc.).

 

I am not good with technical stuff but I have been price shopping for another one of these drives to back up my current computer the same way, so your question caught my attention. I hope this can help.

 

~karri