Solved Can I back up and restore when necessary?

Sorry to be so thick but I do not understand all the different terminology for recovery discs.My problem is that after I have done a factory restore,It takes me ages to get my laptop back to the way it was before the factory restore.Is there a way that I can back up and restore when necessary all the things I've done to my laptop since the last factory restore-Windows updates,Samsung updates,the personalisation I've done,the programs I've installed,the way I have personalised my start screen,the shortcuts I have put on my taskbar etc.,so that my laptop appears the same as what it was.
Again I apologise for asking what is probably a stupid question to people who are tech savvy.
My laptop is a Samsung NP550P5C-A08UK with Windows 8.

Hello Citroen,

You could create a system image to a separate hard drive when you like to back up everything. If ever needed, you could do a system image recovery to restore an image to have everything back to how it was when the image was created.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thank you very much for your prompt reply.To help me to get this right,is a system image the windows 8 os plus what I've done since the last factory restore or is it just what I've added since the last factory restore?
Thanks again for your patience!

A system image takes a snapshot of exactly what your computer is at the time you take it. So, when you restore the image you get back to EXACTLY what you had when you took the image.

So, you can take your computer and make an image on Friday and then turn it off. On Saturday you can buy a brand new blank hard drive. You can remove the old drive, put in the new drive and restore your image and on Sunday you will have everything exactly as it was...just with more free disk space.

Windows has a built in imager, you can also look at

• Aomei data backuper (free)
• Macrium Refect Free (free)
• EaseUs ToDoBackup Free (free)
• Acronis True Image (not free).

Many thanks for your help and patience!

Glad we could help.

I use free Macrium since years and never had a single problem. If you want to use it, here is a tutorial: Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Forums

Thank you very much for your help.I'll buy an external disc and try it.Incidentally,can you use a memory stick rather than an external disc?

You can use a memory stick provided it is large enough. Figure that the image will take about 60 to 65% of the size of your data on C , plus the 100MB of the system partition - so that is a lot of GBs. Incidently, large sticks are very expensive, you will be better off with an external disk of 320 or 500GBs.

Thanks again.I'll get an external disc.It's just that I had a 32GB memory stick.