How to backup hard drive

[CrAz3D]

HP says I should backup my entire hard drive before sending my laptop, now, how would I back up 30+gigs of files easily? 

Is there a way to use my iPod?  (30 gig).  It has all of my music on it already, I'm sure I can fit most/all of my school work onto my flash drive.  But for the misc. things can I use my iPod & can I retrieve songs from the iPod?

[Newby]

Uh....

There is no real easy way.

Get another drive, plug it into your laptop, and use dd to copy the drive over.

[Yegg]

Maybe if you have like 6-7 4.7gb DVD-RWs? That wouldn't be a bad idea, but it may be somewhat annoying through the long, agonizing burning process.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.

[Explicit]

Anything that's hard to obtain later on, back it up. Anything you can easily get back, don't bother saving.

[CrAz3D]

Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.

I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.

[Newby]

Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.

I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.

Don't trust external sources. I lost ~100gb of data that way.

[CrAz3D]

Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.

I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.

Don't trust external sources. I lost ~100gb of data that way.

It's on my laptop (which I've requested NOT be reformatted) & on my iPod, + I've checked to make sure I can retreive stuff from it...although that was only on my laptop, never tried installing the iPod to my desktop, can I even do that?

[Stealth]

Uh....

There is no real easy way.

Get another drive, plug it into your laptop, and use dd to copy the drive over.

I had to do this at work over the summer. My boss had an aging IBM ThinkPad he wanted to upgrade the 8GB hard drive on, so we bought a 40GB drive.

To transfer, I booted into Knoppix and used partimage to copy the entire 8GB drive across the network to another computer which had enough free space. partimage has a GUI, which dd does not, and it can work with samba shares so the Windows 2000 target box could accept the partition images. Then, I installed the new drive and reversed the procedure. IIRC, partimage also let me resize the mirrored drive from 8GB to its full 40GB capacity without any data loss -- I'm not positive.

Tools: Knoppix + another computer with >= your hard drive size of space on it, plus some Googling for guides as to how to use partimage across a samba share.

In your case you will also need an external monitor to boot the laptop onto so you can see what you're doing.

[CrAz3D]

hmm, wow, a little involved.  I don't think I'm gonna try that, but that's good to know need I ever actually save & transfer everything.

[Forged]

External hard drives are fairly cheap at best buy.

[CrAz3D]

External hard drives are fairly cheap at best buy.

iPod is currently function as such, I figure that can work for the 7 days

[iago]

Plug in your ipod, and it'll show up as a drive.  Open the drive, and copy everything you want to save to some folder (I used notes, so I can see which files I have from the iPod's gui).  That's probably the easiest way