How to Clone a Hard Drive Backup
Backing up doesn't have to be piecemeal. It's perfectly possible to back up an entire hard drive, operating system and all, in a form that's easily recoverable should something go wrong with your computer. Clonezilla is a free open source bootable CD designed to create wholesale backups of entire partitions. It works regardless of the operating system you use: Mac OSX, Windows, Linux and most other systems.
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Instructions
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Download Clonezilla (free download; see Resources.) The file you download is an ISO file, a form of virtual CD.
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Burn the ISO file to disk. Mac and Linux users have it easy: they can simply right-click the ISO and click "Burn Image to Disc."
If you're a Windows user and don't know already know how to do this, check out ISO Recorder (free download; see Resources), a program that adds this functionality to Windows Explorer. After installing ISO Recorder, burning an ISO is as simple as right-clicking the file in Windows Explorer and clicking "Burn Image to Disk."
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Boot from the CD. Restart your computer with the CD inserted and the computer should in most cases boot from it automatically. If your computer boots into Windows instead of from the CD, restart the computer and press whatever key is necessary to enter the boot mode. This varies from computer to computer but is typically F2.
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Pick the way you'd like to back up your files. After Clonezilla boots, select "Start Clonezilla" and you'll be prompted with your first choice: "device-image" or "device-device."
Select "device-image" if you'd like to backup all your data as a virtual disc image you can restore later. This is useful if the drive where you intend to store your backup contains other data you can't afford to write over.
Select "device-device" to do a wholesale reconstruction of your hard drive on another hard drive. This will completely overwrite a device with the data on your current drive. This method is not too useful for backup purposes but is perfect if you intend to switch hard drives.
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Select where you'd like to backup your data. You can write to an external hard drive, a network hard drive or a secondary drive on your computer. After you select this, the process of creating the clone will begin.
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