In case you are afraid if your computer will crash suddenly and you will have to reinstall windows which will wipe away all your data, then data backup would be the first way to protect data. But that is not the only way! You know you could take a snap shot of your computer’s hard drive and use it to quickly get back to the same settings with all the programs and files without having to reinstall.
Make sure you have a USB pen drive, an external hard drive and an active Internet connection. Here is how to do it:
- Download Clonezilla, which will help you to create an image of your system.
- Download Tuxboot, which will mount the image taken to the USB pen drive.
- Connect the USB pen drive to the computer and then format it to make it clean without any data in it.
- Open Tuxboot and click on the bottom to choose ISO. Browse to find the clonezilla live.ISO file and mount it on the USB flash drive and hit ok.
- Reboot the computer and enter the BIOS by pressing F2 or Del on your keyboard. Go to the boot section and choose to manually boot from the flash drive which will trigger the system to boot from the clonezilla.
- Select the language on the clonezilla start option and press on start clone zilla liva.
- While asking to choose a device to store the image file, select local disk and hit enter. This will return a pop up to connect the external device. Now plug in the external hard drive and then hit enter.
- Clonezilla will now run a full system scan of all the hard drive connected to your computer and ask on where to save the image file. You may choose the name of the external hard drive and save it directly or create a directory to save the image files.
- Now choose beginner mode and select save disk to start taking the snap shots.
- Select the hard drive that you need to take the snap shot. In case, you have more than one partition, you may need to choose the option sdg for capturing the image of the entire disk.
- Now the system will take a little while to complete the image capture based on the size of the hard drive.
- Once done, your system images are ready in your hard drive to be restored on a different device.