Hey everyone, I'm trying to back up my internal 1TB SSD to a 5TB external HDD since I want to have a copy for emergencies. The external drive is formatted as exFAT and has some files on it that I don't want to delete, but there's about 3TB of space available. I've been searching on YouTube and various sites, but I can't find a clear way to copy my internal storage without wiping the external drive. Any help would really be appreciated! Thanks!
3 Answers
You could use a program like Clonezilla to create an image of your current drive and save it to the external HDD. Just pick the option to save as an image without selecting the partition clone option. If you ever need to restore it to a full image, that’s an option, too! And you can mount the image later in Windows to grab individual files if needed.
If you're just looking to copy files onto the external drive, that should work fine! But if you need the entire drive, it sounds like you’re looking for a disk imaging solution instead.
I want to copy the whole drive, not just individual files.
You can just do a standard file copy of the files you want to keep. If you're looking to transfer the whole drive, you might need to consider imaging it instead to avoid complications. Keeping it simple is key!
By standard file copy, do you mean just moving the files manually? And how would I go about imaging a drive?
So I can make a full drive image and later extract files I need? That sounds great!