Saving information on my hard drive

[wusaga]

I am planning on restoring my computer back to its original factory settings (using the restore disc). I have a external hard drive that has plenty of room to keep all of the files on my cpu. How do I go about transfering this information to the external HD (is there an easier way besides clicking on individual folders and dragging them). I am using a compaq presario running windows XP

 

[raybay]

There are a variety of hard drive back up programs that work well. We like Acronis.
We often put the old drive into an external enclosure, and do not find the drag and drop techniques to be a big problem... More good than bad happens, as we clean-up a lot of "stuff" that needs attention.