# External Hard Drive to Backup Multiple Computers



## JoshuaS99 (Mar 6, 2005)

I have two computers that I use.  One is a 1.6ghz P4 with a 70gig hard drive and the other is a 2.2ghz celeron laptop with a 40gig hard drive.  The laptop has USB 2.0, the desktop has USB 1.1 and firewire, but I'd be willing to add USB 2.0 to it if necessary.
     I have a habit of reformatting them when performance starts to wane and I want a fresh start, but I have to install the same basic programs and restore my main files and OS every time.  I'd like to buy an external hard drive and make images of both of these computers when they are nice and fresh before I start using them.  Can this be done with a single external hard drive?  Only about 8-10 gigs of hard drive space on each computer is being used when they are freshly reformatted.  I'd use the other space on the external hard drive to store backups of pictures, music, and movies.
     Any hardware and software recomendations for doing this.  The cheaper the better for this broke college student.

Thank you,
Josh


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## Praetor (Mar 7, 2005)

Cheapest route is to make a new partiition (or use a non-OS one) on each of the machines and save a ghost image of the C: drive to it. Assumming non catastrophic drive failure (for which you'd be in enough crap anyways) you just need to reghost  (takes about 10 to make the image, 5 to restore)


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