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I'm taking a college course and the first assignment was a Business Impact Analysis of what would happen if my laptop was stolen. By the end of it I had a chart spanning several pages full of lost time and money, and potential catastrophic results to my business and school semester. The best possible recovery plan (short of not having my laptop stolen) was to buy a new laptop and restore from a recent full backup.

I didn't need any further convincing. I went straight out and bought a 1TB external drive. Now I'd like to do a full backup of my ASUS X553M running Windows 8.1. I used to do lots of backups back in the days of WinXP and it was a simple matter to clone a drive. Now, from what I can tell, Windows 8.1 just wants us to do a system restore to the exact same laptop. That won't help if my laptop is gone and I want to get back up and running within a few hours.

How can I backup my system so in a worst case scenario I can go out and buy a new laptop (the exact same make and model if necessary) and do a restore? I don't care about the hardware expense but I don't want to spend days reinstalling software and copying over piecemeal backed up data.

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  • Moving a Windows image to new hardware will cause it not to activate as activation is tied to the original hardware profile. You are best to do a file backup of the needed files, installed programs cannot be backed up due to registry issues.
    – Moab
    Sep 30, 2015 at 20:39

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You cannot backup your software. Your best bet is to create a restore point on said External or backup your files on said External and keep a list of your installed programs.

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  • Thanks G.Zap and Moab. That's very annoying. Back when I used to work in a helpdesk we could backup and reimage laptops and workstations at the drop of a hat. It mitigated us a lot of damage and saved untold hours of work. That was in the WinXP days. Edit: Is it still possible to restore to different hardware in Windows 7? Maybe I'll downgrade my OS.
    – user503811
    Oct 1, 2015 at 1:17
  • If My answer and Moab comment helped, please help us by upvoting and checking the answer as it helps our rep. As for your Edit...I do not believe Windows 7 can do what you want. Oct 1, 2015 at 13:15

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