Hmm … how to make this about DoYouClone? ;-)
In response to [@David] “… @Peter I cannot thank you enough for your complete answer, both explaining everything clearly, and giving a fully detailed set of instructions of more than one way to do what I want to do, and of how you do it. Out of this world! Fantastic! Amazing! Yes, and much thanks to Ashraf – not only for what he gives us – but also for giving us this forum in which to meet and to share and to help each other. Peter, I think you and I have both been here with Ashraf for at least ten years. May I be audacious and ask you another question? If no, then stop here. If yes, forgive me if I write too long. As I wrote, the first thing I do want to do is to copy data from one old external hard disk to a new one, for backup … and, as you so keenly noted, to keep the back up updated. But I’ve wondered about whether or not to get another external hard disk for a different purpose. I used an HP Pavilion g laptop for very many years (primarily for downloaded papers and for papers I write … inter alia, I have two Ph.D’s and have been active in several fields beyond those, and, as I wrote, for family and travel/nature pictures). Yes, and I did download to the HP numerous programs from Sharewareonsale (I actively used only a few). At one point the original HP’s hard disk broke down, and I put in a new internal drive/disk and started again. I updated from Windows 7 to 10. Now, after several more years, I suspect my HP is filling up, and running down. So I’ve gotten a Lenovo ideapad 3, and have been getting into using it – with Windows 11. Strictly speaking, I can still run the HP, and I did copy all the downloads, pictures, and documents onto the external disk drive I was using with it (WD Elements, 2 GB). But I wonder whether I ought to get another external disk/drive, and clone the HP internal disk/drive to it, just so I have everything that I ever had/used/did on the HP available. That’s my question – is it a good idea to go to that trouble, or does it not matter enough to spend the money on a new external drive, plus the time and the trouble? If I did that, would I run that external drive some time on my Lenovo ideapad? (Just a brief personal word to introduce me: the first program I wrote and sold ($300) was about 53 years ago; when microprocessors were born I learned how to program them, moving bits so I could use the tiny memories efficiently (remember 64k????); but I’ve moved on to many other things, so I’m now pretty much just a user and not into programming, and not completely up-to-date. So your help, Peter, really means a lot to me!) …”
#1 – Drives are cheap.
#2 – Yes, cloning <– with DoYouClone ( got it in ! ) the HP will
– get everything,
– AND allow reading everything from the target external USB drive on the Lenovo,
– AND allow the target cloned external USB drive to boot the HP if it ever needs to be swapped into the HP.
BUT the external USB drive must internally be the same shape and size and attachment as the internal HP drive if you ever expect to swap it into the HP to recover from a failure of the original HP drive.
Few WD external USB drives can be removed from their external cabinets ( ‘shucked’ ) and then be inserted into a computer because they are not SATA drives inside, they are USB drives inside.
Seagate and Toshiba external USB drives tend to contain SATA drives in their cabinets and can therefore be ‘shucked’ and the internal SATA drive itself can be swapped into a computer to boot it up.
Plus, any local computer shop can sell you a SATA drive in an external USB cabinet regardless of the brand names of the parts, Microcenter and Amazon and everyone else sells the individual parts, cheap.
So, again, the ONLY advantage of DoYourClone is it will make a cloned backup boot disk.
If that’s valuable, go for it.
If you never expect to boot from the backup USB drive, then FREE XCopy or RoboCopy will do just fine to copy everything, including Windows and Programs ( they just won’t run, but they are backup copies that are useful if you ever need to search for and replace a corrupted driver or corrupted program file ), AND XCopy and RoboCopy will then pick up where they left off whenever you have new stuff to add to the external backup drive ( DoYouClone would wipe the drive first, and if the drive actually contained the ONLY copy of something, it would be wiped out – ouch! ).
To paraphrase Neil Sedaka, backing up is hard to do.
Philosophically, anyway.
I hope I’ve helped you – and others – simplify how to look at backing up:
– data, over and over,
– or boot+windows+programs+data, once,
… and helped simplify how to do either task.
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Don’t be shy, [@David], tell us what program you created and sold!
I wrote a Tic-tac-toe program for the $99 Timex Sinclair and tried to sell it for $1 ( on cassette, no less ! ), but that was so cheap, people couldn’t believe it could possibly be worth it, so nobody bought it – I should have made it $9.95 at least!
– – – – –
Thanks again, Ashraf, for letting us explore this and share.
.