How to backup your entire computer into a Virtual PC

How often do you backup the important files in your computer? It could be family photos, your working documents, or even your mp3 files. Image by Kunstee.

Sometimes, I realize that I have way too many important files in my computer, especially on my desktop. It just feels like everything on my computer is important, so it makes backing up my files to an external drive or online storage very troublesome.

If you have the same feeling as I do, then I guess we all need a way to backup our entire computer without having to selectively select the files to copy to an external drive.

One way is to utilize this neat little utility called Disk2vhd which allows you to create a Virtual PC image of your current computer. This way, whatever is on your machine right now goes right into the Virtual PC image (vhd format) so you can safely store it in an external hard disk.

In case your notebook gets stolen or your computer’s hard disk crashed, as long as the VPC Image of your computer is quite recent, you can be assured that most of your files and programs are still accessible. All you need to do is install the Virtual PC software on a new machine and load up your VPC image and use it as if you’re working on your lost notebook.

This sort of backup is unlike those that creates an image of your computer which can only be restored on the same specifications machine. If your machine is really lost, you can copy the vhd file to another machine and begin using it. Of course the performance of the Virtual PC image won’t be as good as the computer itself, but all your files and programs will still be there.

The disadvantage of Disk2vhd is it will take up much space to create the VPC image.

As you can see from the screenshot above, a hard disk which is 300GB in size requires nearly 38GB space to create a vhd file.

Another thing to note is that once you’ve created the vhd file, you can’t boot up the vpc image on the same machine where the image was taken, It must be loaded on another machine.For more details on this, read it up on Disk2vhd’s website.

To begin backing up your entire PC into a Virtual PC image, check out Disk2vhd today!

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