I do these things in a different way so my 'advice' should be read with some reservation as to its suitability for every situation.
With a 320 Gb drive one of the smaller external drives in your catalogue, (1Tb or less) should be adequate.
If I bought this external drive and backed up the whole computer would I be able to relaod it into a newly purchased laptop ??
As I see it - probably not.
A new laptop will almost certainly have an operating system (probably W8) already installed. The operating system files in any given computer were loaded with the specific hardware options in that machine as a blueprint for the whole job. Every computer (other than (
perhaps) exact clones of a prototype production machine) will, after the OS is installed have significant differences in what files are installed both in the OS itself and most other programs / applications which are installed to any other computer.
What this means is that unless it is an exact physical clone of the failed machine, simply loading a complete saved C drive partition unto a 'new' machine will not result in a working alternative. I need also to add that given the 'protection systems' built into Windows, it's unlikely that even a reload to a clone machine will be successful.
India four two's suggestion is a good one - one which follows my own process - but it's only going to be totally successful if loaded back onto the computer which 'fathered' it. This assumes that the potential failure in the machine is a HD crash and nothing else.
My backup 'policy' is simply to save all data (photos, documents etc) onto external hard drives, and if a smoke should appear from the computer at some time, be prepared to start again with a new installation of the OS and all programs on a rebuild or new box and selectively then add the saved data from the previous computer.
You can also save your emails, address books and favourites /bookmarks and reload them into a new machine. Most of these programs have a backup facility for these parameters in their tools options.
Most backup up programs - like the ones you already have - will probably do more or less that same thing (as far as I know) but in an automated and structured manner.
I hope that other esteemed contributors to this board may add their observations and personal experiences in this matter.
However a purchase of a modest external HDD - one of those you've mentioned - and using your existing programs to operate with this as the backup medium may well be all you need.
Please let us know how you go.....
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