AlienRespawn / Datasafe ... any free alternative?

I just ordered the m14x, set it up the way I want, downloaded like 20-30GB of games and software (put myself over my bandwidth limit for the month) and now I find out that my hard drive is bad and I need to get a new one.

Dell is sending me a tech to come install a new hard drive, but I don't want to redo everything I did over the last 2 weeks because:

1) Thats super annoying
2) I will end up paying about $50 in bandwidth to redownload everything
3) I am too busy running a few businesses to deal with another reinstall.

I wanted to use AlienRespawn, but Dell has a new policy of charging for the 'full' version of the software ... the free version doesn't create a hard drive image to slap onto the new windows install.

Is there any way that you guys can think of to be able to just back up everything (games, software, files, etc) and just plug it into the new hard drive on a fresh windows install so that all of my problems and settings will be back to the way they are today?


(without paying dell another cent)

 

Rather than spending $50 in bandwidth, spend a similar amount on an external hard drive. You really ought to have one for backup anyway. You can not only back up your things, but if you buy one that is large enough you can create a restore/clone drive image for disaster recovery using a number of free apps that are available.

If most of your games are Steam-based, you can use Steam's built-in backup features to back them up to the external drive and restore them on your new drive. Hopefully, for any other software that you downloaded, you saved the installation packages. If you did, simply copy those to the external drive and reinstall them.

It would be best to have a clean Windows installation on the new drive to ensure the installation is pristine and not introduce any corruption from the bad drive.

 

Best Free Drive Imaging Program

 

Most of them are on Origin actually ... do you know if Origin lets you back up games?

I ended up finding out that my copy of Norton 360 lets me backup ... and I do have a 1 TB hd ... so I'm using that, screw you Dell Datasafe =P

I'm not 100% sure though what I'm backing up to this drive ... I just know its 48GB of "stuff" ... I'm not sure if it's going to let me restore it once windows is on the new drive...

 

I don't know if Origin has that feature, bro.

As far as drive imaging goes, there are a number of free alternatives that work well, including the one included with Windows 7. If you're only looking for a simple data backup, the native Windows 7 backup program works fine for that as well.

Did you get the new drive installed? Did it resolve the issues with your sluggish system?