Back Up Windows 7 Computer to External Hard Drive

Why Do You Need to Back Up Your Windows 7 Computer

By backing up your Windows 7 computer to an external hard drive, you can:

Avoid complete data loss

Data loss occurs on a daily basis on computers due to misoperations or unexpected errors. Since we cannot completely prevent it from happening, the optimal choice to avoid losing important data is to back up computer elsewhere. By backing up Windows 7 and files on the computer to an external hard drive, you can protect your operating system and data against situations that may cause data loss like system crash, hard disk failure, and virus attacks.

Free up hard drive space

It's common that there are too many files occupying your disk space and making your Windows 7 computer run slow. To boost your computer's performance without losing data, you will need to make a backup in advance before you delete the files from your computer to free up disk space and speed up Windows.

The Tool You Need - Windows 7 Backup Software

It's no doubt that you can back up files and settings on your Windows 7 computer to an external hard drive by manually copying the items or using the inbuilt Backup and Restore feature. However, the former method won't compress the files, which means they will take up much space on your external hard drive, and the latter only enables you to back up the whole drive instead of the folders or files on it. That's why you need the flexible Windows backup software - Qiling Backup to freely back up the files on your Windows 7 computer.

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This software maximizes your freedom to back up your Windows 7 computer. Whether you want to solely back up the Windows 7 OS, some files/folders, partition, or disks, you can do it with the help of Qiling Backup. Besides, it's also equipped with an automatic backup feature that enables you to schedule your backup.

Back up and restore Outlook emails, files, OS, partitions, and disks in Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP
Back up data to a local hard drive, external storage devices, computer under the same LAN, cloud device, and more
Perform or schedule full, differential, and incremental backups
Create an emergency disk that helps to rescue your data when the computer fails to boot

Qiling Backup will back up your Windows 7 OS or the files on your computer to an image file that is much smaller than the original size and you can easily perform recovery as long as you have the backup available. In addition, this software also provides disk cloning features that allow you to migrate OS to SSD, update HDD to a larger HDD or better-performed SSD, and more.

How to Back Up Computer to External Hard Drive in Windows 7

Depending on the content you'd like to back up, you can choose Disk/Partition Backup, System Backup, File Backup, or Email Backup. The following steps show you how to back up Windows 7 to an external hard drive with Qiling backup and recovery software. If you want to back up some specific files/folders or disks on your computer, choose File Backup or Disk/Partition Backup instead.

Notice:

Empty the storage device if you want to back up your Windows 7 to another storage device such as external hard drive or USB.

Step 1. Connect your external storage device to your PC if you want to backup the Windows 7 system to an external hard drive, USB or SD card.

And the external storage device should be equal to or even bigger than your Windows 7 system size.

Step 2. Launch and run Qiling Backup on your Windows 7 PC, choose "System backup" on the "Backup and recovery" page.

Step 3. Choose Windows 7 that you want to back up.

And specify a location on your PC, an external storage device or even a network drive as your Windows 7 system backup destination.

Step 4. Click "Proceed" to start the Windows 7 system backup process now.

If you want to create a backup plan to automatically create Windows 7 system restore points, continue with below tips:

1. Click "Schedule: Off" after clicking System Backup and set the type that you want to backup Windows 7 system by day, week or even month.

2. And "Save" all changes.

Then continue with "Step 3" and "Step 4", after the first full backup of your Windows 7 system, Qiling Backup will automatically backup your system as you scheduled by then.

Qiling Backup will offer you a compression option to compress and encrypt your Windows 7 files to the external hard drive so to protect the data security and save more save on the destination drive. Whether you want to back up your Windows 7, the OS, or want to back up files on your Windows 7 computer, you can apply this software to easily get things done.

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How to Recover Files from Windows 7 Computer

If you have lost files from your Windows 7 computer and there is no backup available for you to recover these items, you can use the advanced hard drive recovery software - Deep Data Recovery to safely get your data back. It supports the data recovery from local hard drives on your Windows 7 computer or Windows-compatible storage devices. It will help you recover almost any file type after emptying recycle bin, accidental deletion, formatting, OS reinstallation, OS crash, and other tough data loss situations. If you have lost files on your computer running Windows 7, learn how to recover deleted files in Windows 7 computers.