Suggestions on Laptop Backup?

[MrSmiley]

One doesn't realize how used to company bought/mandated software/tools until suddenly you're sitting at home years later and thinking "well I don't have that anymore... what else can I do?"

I have an older Dell Laptop C610, which was obsolete when I bought it but does everything I bought it for... so I continue being happy with it. However it's in some need of maintenance (not to mention I'm going to try a *nix distro on it and see if it has enough power) and so I'd like to backup what I have and reinstall. But I can't even remember what tools are good for this, I got kindof used to network backups and Norton Ghost.

I'm not looking for a full backup of everywhere and everything, I can reinstall Windows from it's CD, however I would like to hold on to all of the laptop's drivers since I'm not sure if Dell still has the webpage up for this model, and I'm unable to find where I stored them before. Just would like to get basic settings and configuration saved somewhere so I can drop it back into a fresh install later on if needbe (and probably will)...

Any suggestions on the best tools for the job? Bonus points if they're open source. Also let me know if I'm overthinking this.

[crashhelmet]

In all honesty, the best thing I could recommend is to use Ghost and burn an image of the drive to a CD/DVD. Easier to get it all done than to worry about making sure you got everything.

As far as drivers are concerned, I always make it a point to create a separate folder on my HDD to store the install files for all of the drivers and then back them up to an external/USB drive. Dell is usually good about having older drivers still available.

The other option, which will cost you about $15 or so, is to order the restore CDs from Dell and then only back up the necessary files, like your My Documents.

CH

[MrSmiley]

As far as drivers are concerned, I always make it a point to create a separate folder on my HDD to store the install files for all of the drivers and then back them up to an external/USB drive. Dell is usually good about having older drivers still available.

Now that I've had time to sleep on it, I think that's probably the best idea... make a list of the drivers I'm using on the system and make sure I have them all backed up somewhere that I can burn to a cd.