Need your advise on backup with 120GB portable HD.

Recently I bought 120GB portable USB hard drive to backup my laptop with 40GB HDD and Windows XP Home. Now I'm going to download TI 11. I'm planning to do the followings and have some questions. Can you advise me if I'm doing is right?

1 Partition the portable drive into three drives, D, E, F. (40GB each)
2 Backup the local C drive into D drive.
3 Clone the local C drive into E drive.
4 F drive is used for extra storage.

Questions:
1 Can I transfer the clone image into a new computer with Windows XP or Vista.
2 If I can't clone with a new computer, should I backup using Windows Files and Settings Transfer Wizard for a new computer?

These stuff is totally new for me. So please let me know things I have to keep in mind.

 

To avoid any possible confusion it would be a good idea to give meaningful names to all your drive partitions. This is particularly important as you will be making them all the same nominal size.

The reason for this is that when booted from the recovery CD TI your partitions will appear with some drive letters changed. This is not a problem in itself as they will revert to the original letters when you reboot into Windows. However in the recovery environment you do not want to image or restore the wrong partition to the wrong place

 

I don't see the need for BOTH a Backup and Clone of your laptop drive. Just the Backup will do, but you must find a way to do an actual restore to make sure the Backup is good - i.e. you should invest in a second laptop drive. Verification of the Backup is not totally 100 percent guarantee it is.

 

TrueImage perform "disk cloning"--not partition cloning. option 3 is not possible if you wish to perform the other options.

There is no reason to partition the external drive. The TI image archives can be satisfactory stored/separated in their own folders.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184414#6

Should you restore an image archive to a different computer, it would be diffucult for a different computer to be functionable. Should you use "universal restore" option, then you might make it functionable.

 

Thank you, guys, for your replies. Especially, thank you, GroverH, for pointing out that cloning is for disk, not for partition.

Now I will do a backup, TI image archives, for my external drive.

But my concern is that what would happen if my laptop were stolen. As you wrote, restoring an image archive to a different computer is not functionable.

So I'm thinking of installing another copy of Windows XP in Drive D on my external hard drive and making it rebootable.

Q1. Can I clone or synchronize the local C drive with D drive on the external USB drive without reinstalling applications installed in drive C?

Q2. Can I hook up my external drive to a different laptop running Windows Vista and reboot to drive D so that I can have a virtual Windows XP PC with everything I had on drive C?

Q3. Can clone D drive with a local drive in the laptop running Windows Vista?

Thanks in advance for your generosity.

 

I have not read where you can boot Windows from an external usb drive. I'm looking for that feature myself.

 

You might take a look at this.