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How to Backup a Partition to an External Hard Drive

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My computer has a factory recovery partition on it. My plan is to wipe the drive and set it up like my other computers with the OS (WINDOWS 7) one one partition and data on the other. I have a Windows installation disc, so I don't think I'll need the recovery partition and all the trial software and junk that comes from the manufacturer. However, I want to keep that recovery partition just in case something goes wrong in the process. How can I save this recovery partition to an external hard drive so that I can use it to boot from should I need to?

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John,
In my opinion, if you want this as a safety valve in case things do not go as planned, my suggestion would be that you perform a complete disk backup (all partitions) so as to have the backup include everything on the disk including the recovery partition. By doing so, you have access to the content of any of the partitions and could reproduce the computer in an identical fashion--should you have a need. Storage space would be about 65% of current used space on the disk.

You can boot from the Acronis Rescue CD and attempt to make a backup copy of the Recovery partition but past postings would seem to indicate that a single recovery of the one partition does not always happen successfully. Making a backup of everything provides additional insurance of recovery.