backup

[CarolW1]

Don't know how to back up the system; can I back it up to the Recovery Drive (D)? Or do I need an external drive? Should I use "File HIstory?"

Thanks in advance.

CarolW1

[WAWood]

@CarolW1

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

The answer to all those questions is NO.

The Recovery Drive contains a compressed Windows image, some drivers, and some HP utilities -- and is ONLY used to do a factory reset of your PC.  If you do anything with that drive, you risk corrupting the Recovery function.

You don't need an external drive, but a full image backup of your PC could take 32GB or more, so I would suggest a large USB stick, instead.

Using File History only backs up copies of files is not the way to do a backup such that it can be used to restore your PC.

I personally prefer to use third-party Recovery solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the USB stick in only a few minutes.

Good Luck