Backup EVERYTHING to a USB stick

[JohnJameson]

Hello! I would like to know how I can backup EVERYTHING on my laptop to a USB Stick and I would like to know how to use my backup, say if my laptop's storage was erased or i'm using a different/new computer.

What I mean by everything is all my applications installed, my save game data, everything in my user's folder and any other data I might need/want.

 

Any help is really appreciated! I'm looking for many different ways.

[Mnky313]

14 minutes ago, JohnJameson said:

Hello! I would like to know how I can backup EVERYTHING on my laptop to a USB Stick and I would like to know how to use my backup, say if my laptop's storage was erased or i'm using a different/new computer.

What I mean by everything is all my applications installed, my save game data, everything in my user's folder and any other data I might need/want.

 

Any help is really appreciated! I'm looking for many different ways.

I use disk2vhd though it does take up a bunch of space (as it creates a VHD file of the entire contents of your ssd/hdd), it will definitely backup everything though.

edit: I should add, you can just double click this vhd(x) file and windows will mount it like any other drive, from there you can go through and get any data you might need back by just copying and pasting from the mounted vhd to any other drive.

Edited July 23, 2021 by Mnky313
clarification

[RockSolid1106]

If you want to be able to boot off your flash drive, you'll most probably need to install the OS onto it.

 

SSDs or Hard Drives have specialized components to enhance their endurance, so they last long. They are designed to encounter a lot of reads and writes.

 

Flash drives on the other hand are not designed for high endurance. They don't expect you to boot an OS off of it. So if you try to boot an OS off of it or keep reading/writing a lot of files, they'll die very quickly.

 

Then, there are the latencies. Flash drives get to quite high latencies if you start to read/write a lot of stuff from them. As Linus demonstrated in one of his video(linked below), the latencies when he booted Windows from an SD Card went as high as 9 seconds. Computer drives have DRAM cache, and other controllers to help minimize latencies and let the drive be able to access files quickly, and faster.

 

A better way should be to repurpose an old HDD in an external drive enclosure.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited July 23, 2021 by RockSolid1106

[Zando_]

I'd just do a straight clone to an external HDD (not SSD, not USB stick, if those fail you can't recover the data, whereas you can get the data off an HDD platter if the drive fails). Ton of free tools to do so, and it'll do essentially an exact copy of your entire system, usually you can even boot from them. 

[SpookyCitrus]

What you want to do is called a full image backup. Depending on the storage space your current install and data takes up a flash drive may not be able to hold that much information. For doing image backups I would recommend using an external HDD, not a flash drive. 

[RockSolid1106]

 

6 minutes ago, Mnky313 said:

I use disk2vhd though it does take up a bunch of space (as it creates a VHD file of the entire contents of your ssd/hdd), it will definitely backup everything though.

edit: I should add, you can just double click this vhd(x) file and windows will mount it like any other drive, from there you can go through and get any data you might need back by just copying and pasting from the mounted vhd to any other drive.

Yes. And you can just import it into Hyper-V or something and actually boot a Virtual Machine from that vhd, which would be an exact clone of your physical computer.