How to backup a laptop for successful recovery?

Hi,

Most lap tops these days dont provide with the software necessary (such as drivers, installed applications, etc) to rebuild the lap top? At most they seem to provide a recovery partition but that only handles certain recovery scenarios. So how do people rebuild/restore the contents of the hard drive?

On my desktop I use bart/drive xml but could you use it to restore a Windows Vista when the OEM that it was built with is Windows XP. What else is out there and have people proven that it works (any caveats?)?

I'm asking because I'm looking around for a new lap top and I'd like to know how to handle situations where having a way of going to backup baseline would be handy - such as failed/changing OS upgrades, going back to a more optimal windows environment, etc.

Beetle.

 

I recommend buying a retail copy of the OS you use (XP, Vista), unless you use Ubuntu, which is free. This enables the full reinstall of the OS. Of course, if you reinstall Vista too many times, you will have to contact Microsoft to explain why your copy has to be validated yet again.

For backups, Paragon Drive Backup to an external USB drive.

 

the best program i have ever used is Acronis True Image. You install and run it and it makes a backup of your entire hard drive to 1 file like on an external drive. anything at all ever happens you put in the boot disk it gives you and choose the backup you made. bam, it restores the computer exactly the way it was in less then 15 minutes. very very fast. it rocks.

 

Whatever is used for backup, be sure to fully test the restore. You want to know if it will or not before finding out it won't.