Hard help: is there a way to clone you current hard drive to an external hard drive and can still clone the external to the internal? - Help.com

I think a lot of external hard drives you buy nowadays actually come with pre-packaged software that can help you do this easily. Some even have options to update the external hard drive every so often. There are a lot of stand-alone programs out there, but I haven’t personally used any, so I can’t offer recommendations. However, I do suggest looking up reviews of these programs on amazon.com or a similar site before buying anything.

Also, I do know that Windows XP has a built in program for backing up your hard drive. From the Start menu, it’s under all programs, then accessories, then system tools, then backup. I’m not sure if it can do the reverse process, but I’m sure most standalone backup software, as well as what comes bundled with external hard drives, can do it, because what would be the point if they couldn’t?

Dual Layer DVDs have a 8.5 GB capacity. As far as I know, there’s no way to burn your own HD or Blu Ray DVDs, but the technology to do so should be out relatively soon (probably a matter of months rather than years). If you wanna try the disk route, both HD and Blu Ray DVDs have way more than 20 GB worth of storage, so waiting might be worth it. However, you’d have to buy a new CD/DVD burner which can get a little expensive anyway.

And the windows backup requires a second hard drive, be it external or internal. There’s no real point to backing up a hard drive onto itself, you’d just have two copies of everything all in the same places I guess. I have a friend who has an external had drive and everything just was included in the package. He just presses a single button after configuring the program once and only once, and it will completely copy everything on his original hard drive to the external one.

Well, if the stuff on the drive you’re cloning from is larger than the drive you’re cloning to, how do you expect to clone the drive? You can simply backup important documents and such - but if your drives are of appropriate sizes, Ghost is the utility I’d use. It often runs into errors if improperly configured or if one of the hard disks has too many surface errors, but is overall a good piece of software.