Creating a mirror on an external drive
Advantages
It will be an exact image of what is on the drive. Will be real quick to re-image the drive. The drive is portable.
Disadvantage
If the hard drive is infected with a virus or spyware before the mirror was done, the image can have the virus or spyware on it. Unless you have another system that you don't mind wiping the drive, there is no way to verify the mirror is good or not.
There are different methods to back up. Click on them for more information.
Here are other pages that may help you as well.
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Information about moving a program to another computer
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Information about backing up files in the event the computer crashes
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There is a limit to how many files can be on the root of a drive
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When you are copying the contents of one folder to another, it may appear to be a success. However there are times that some files do not get copied over and if you don't verify the folder, you may loose some files. Click here for instructions on verifying the folder you copied and the folder you pasted the files to match.