please help archiving and backing up to an external hard drive

Question

Firstly I know nothing about computers so please bear with me. I have been searching Google but am now mega confused.

I have just bought a WD external harddrive 1TB to backup my Windows PC and store the drive off site incase of theft or fire.

This is what I think I want to achieve:

1. Do a complete operating system backup, to be able to restore my PC if it fails. I will want to reback this up probably once a month and it can be written over or replaced.
2. Store a load of old emails and photos that can then be deleted off my PC. They would be accessible on the external harddrive if needed, but never written over or deleted. New archived files could be added to this area when needed.
3. Back up all existing data files (itunes/photos/documents/emails) on a monthly basis. This would be ideal if it just added anything new each time, ie, just syncronised the new data with the old and saved it.

Please help.

Answer 1

Answers in order: 1) This is called making a system image, or imaging. This seems like a fairly good article on imaging.

2 and 3) Photos, documents, music, regular files of the sort can generally simply be copy-pasted onto the external hard drive. This eliminates any complicated compressing, decompressing, splitting, anything like that which I guess you don't really want.

Answer 2

I'd suggest you set up a way to clone your system, you might want to start here:

• http://packratstudios.com/index.php/2008/03/11/symantec-ghost-who-a-list-of-open-source-alternatives/

Use either the System Backup tool, or something better, to make recent/frequent copies of your more important files. See here for some answers:

• Software to backup data and files on a Windows computer

Answer 3

I used to use Acronis (and still do) however I recently ran into this program:
AOMEI Backupper
It even allows me to create a bootable CD with which to restore the computer and injects some of the odd drivers into the live WinPE version of the CD.

NOTE: I would still create several versions of the bootable environment just in case. All though I still use Acronis 11.5 (the commercial version) because it has a feature called Universal restore and that allows me to inject the hard drive controller driver into an offline system, (9 out of 10 this is what causes the blue screen if you were to plug your hard drive into a new computer with different chipset and pretend to boot windows from it) thus allowing me to have my restored system be able to boot onto almost any new computer regardless of how different the hardware is.
However using universal restore is a bit beyond the scope of this answer.