I cannot for the life of me figure out how to backup the entire system and its files onto a USB drive. The computer I'm working with was purchased with XP preloaded, so I don't have an XP disc from which to load the backup wizard, like I saw mentioned on one forum article. Any advice?? Thanks a bunch!1 person needs an answerI do too

If your PC came with winxp preloaded, there must be a method of recovery to factory spec, either by means of restore disks or a hidden recovery partition, which you access to make the recovery disks.Any way, NTBackup will only backup to HD or floppy, not usb or cd.There are many backup apps, some of them free. Acronis TI can be used to make an image of your entire system

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to backup the entire system and its files onto a USB drive. The computer I'm working with was purchased with XP preloaded, so I don't have an XP disc from which to load the backup wizard, like I saw mentioned on one forum article. Any advice?? Thanks a bunch!Best way is to get a disk cloning/imaging application. Three that I know of (none free) in no particular order areAcronis TrueImage Home 2011One of the Paragon Drive Backup productsCasper

Okay, great. I'm not very versed technologically, but do you have any recommendations as far as a good free applications go?I'm not sure what an NTBackup is, is that something I can do on my own w/out any purchased software?Are there any disadvantages to making a image of the entire system compared to any of the other ways?Thank you again for your time!

Okay, great. I'm not very versed technologically, but do you have any recommendations as far as a good free applications goes?I'm not sure what an NTBackup is, is that something I can do on my own w/out any purchased software?Are there any disadvantages to making a image of the entire system compared to any of the other ways?Thank you again for your time!NTBackup is the backup utility that is part of Windows XP. If you have XP Pro, it is installed already. If you have XP Home, you'd have to get it from the install CD -- which you don't have.You can download the NTBackup installer from http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/ntbackup.msi but I suggest that you not bother with NTBackup; it's pretty basic. IMO, it's worth paying for something as important as backing up your system. Here's a description of how to use NTBackup: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx (it's a pretty old article, so the suggestions for 3rd-party alternatives at the end are likely to point to products that no longer exist).The two main disadvantages to creating an image of the entire drive rather than backing up specific files and folders are space and time. You can minimize both by doing what's called an "incremental" backup, which backs up only those things that have changed since the last backup. Usually, this is limited to disk imaging software rather than disk cloning software, but Casper has some technology that permits incremental clones. AFAIK, this permits much more rapid cloning than otherwise, but I expect that it takes up just about the same amount of space as a "full clone" -- but the space doesn't matter, because you only should have one clone on the backup drive.The advantage of a clone -- as compared to a disk image or a backup of individual files -- is that in the event of an operating system crash/problem, you can simply swap in the cloned disk and you're back up and running without having to boot using an "emergency CD."An advantage of disk images is that you can keep several on one backup drive. For example, if you backup every night, you might keep the last 3 backup images. That way, if you discover on Thursday that you need a file that you deleted on Tuesday, you'll still be able to find it, whereas if you made a new clone every night, Wednesday night's clone won't have the file deleted the day before.If all you want to do is to backup specific files and folders to an external hard drive, the absolute simplest thing to do is just to copy them. Or you could use Microsoft's freeSyncToy to copy things semi-automatically.