how do i back my laptop up to an external hd?

[SMKR]

I just bought an external HD, and need to back everything on my laptop up to it and do a factory reset since I'm selling it. Anyone mind telling me how to do it? Thanks

[Geor!]

You want to back the data up, or make a complete copy of the drive?

[SMKR]

I just want to be able to access my documents, photos and music files

[Geor!]

Just hook that motherfucker up to a USB port and copy the shit over! Then wipe the laptop when you're done

[Ratt]

Just hook that motherfucker up to a USB port and copy the shit over! Then wipe the laptop when you're done

This! Drag and drop, baby!

[Darren M]

Personally, and I know this is super old skool but it works. I use a batch file setup in Windows Task Scheduler.

c:
cd\
xcopy "c:\Directory I want backed up" "e:\Destination of my directory"  /E /M /C /G /H /R /Y /J /I
xcopy "c:\More Data" "e:\Destination of more data"  /E /M /C /G /H /R /Y /J /I
xcopy "c:\Out look stuff" "e:\Dest Outlook" /E /M /C /G /H /R /Y /J /I>e:\lastbackup.txt

exit

The last xcopy runs and it's results are written to e:\lastbackup.txt so I can see date/time stamp of last successful backup. I have this run everynight as I'm afraid of hard drive failure. All the code I write gets backed up daily/manually, to an offsite SVN server so I'm not really worried about "versions" of things, just "today's" data.

To employ the batch file on your machine just replace the c:\Data paths with the paths you wish to backup and obviously the e:\ drive and destinations. In a console/DOS screen you can do "xcopy /?" to research the switches.

Oh yeah, on the edit. My OS is Win 7 32 so the switches might change if you're in XP, Win8, etc. Also, there's a ton of information on the web for setting up a simple Windows Task in Scheduler. Google it for detailed how to's.