Back-ups - I wonder

[windy10]

Although many say to create a back-up of your Harddrive. I for one have not done this as Microsoft say to do this.

I have a external drive and I save all the emails, photos and documents etc on that.

But if I did create a back-up as told of my Harddrive on the external drive. If any time I need to recover my data, will it all be recovered as I left it. Also is it as straight forward to recover if new a Harddrive was installed to recover from my external drive.

 

[Grizzly]

Well, there is a Backup and there is a Backup. Backup is a strategy depending of what you want to backup and what is most important to you. There is the file backup like you do back up your emails,photos etc onto an external hard drive. Then there is an Image backup. This basically stores an image of your hard drive onto an external drive.This can be restored at any time but remember this: documents photos etc created after the image was made are not included. Then there is the clone. You can create an identical backup from your hard drive which then will be also bootable if needed.
My own strategy is a combination of the first two. My files are on a separate drive anyway so I can make a backup any time I want to. Once a week I make an Image of my system drive. If I have to restore the image I am loosing only the programs that I installed since the last Image creation. My files (documents photos etc) are backed up daily on an external HDD.
It is up to you to choose which method will work best for you.....

BTW: I would not use the windows own backup feature unless you create a rescue disc. I myself am using Acronis True Image (the 2011 Version), but there are others out there as well like Macrium etc...