Basic question on backing up

I have just downloaded paragon backup and recovery software 10.2 the free version. I put an extra hard disk in my pc and started to try and back up my main c: drive to it. I then started the backup wizard; however when I came to the options for backing up it says either back up "basic hard drive 0" or c: drive. I didn't know which option to choose so I choose the basic hard drive 0. I've looked at the manuals and there isn't a clear explanation of which to choose. Can anyone help?

 

Up to you.

You can choose to back up the entire HD in one go. That will back up the first track of the drive and all partitions.

Or back up only the partition(s) you want to.

Only you can decide what you want to back up and how often.

 

I am hoping that if my main c: drive fails then I can put in another physical hard drive, format it if necessary and then using my recovery cd and my backed up data make a replacement which I can boot off. So I am thinking that I will need the boot sector.

 

For that , you will need the boot critical files.

They are on the partition listed as "system" in Windows Disk Management.

If your C partition is listed as "system" - that is all you need to back up.

If you have a separate 100mb "system" partition , back it up as well.

 

I can't believe this. The software is called Backup and recovery so I would of thought that backing up your hard disk so you can just slot in another one in if the original goes wrong was one of the most basic requirements of the software. And now you are saying that it isn't that simple. This is very strange.

 

Timothy110,

Yes, you can back up your system and use that backup to restore it to a new hard disk, should yours fail.

What SIW2 is saying is that you may or may not need to backup the entire disk (basic hard disk 0), because depending on your system configuration, the boot files may or may not be on your C: drive, so just doing a backup of the C: drive may or may not result in a bootable image.

So to answer your original question, I would suggest you select basic hard disk 0, just to be sure you have everything.

 

Thank you for your response. That was really all I needed to know.