How do I transfer my entire hard drive contents to a flash drive?

How can I transfer the contents of my PC hard drive to a flash drive, or to an external hard drive, and can I transfer all but certain entries. I want to do this without tediously transfrerring one entry at a time.

How do I transfer my entire hard drive contents to a flash drive?
If you use Windows Explorer, or the windows interface, you can do the following steps. I hope it won't be confusing:





First you'll want to open up the contents of your drive, which I'm guessing is the 'C Drive', if not, open up the appropriate drive name.





Step 1: Open My Computer and click on the drive that contains the files you wish to move. Highlight everything in this box my click on an open area inside the window and dragging a box around all the contents.





Step 2: Open up another My Computer window but then select the external drive, (as a user said before, a flash drive will probably be too small, and is less reliable as it uses static technology).





Step 3: Hopefully the windows are small enough that you can simply drag the highlighted items by click and holding down the click over the highlighted items and releasing the key as the mouse hovers over the external drives My Computer window. If not, it only takes a second or two to make the windows small enough to do this.





Step 4: Wait for windows to copy the data, (it gives a guesstimation), and once the copying is done, voila! The contents are now on the external harddrive!





Note: This process is known as the 'Drag and Drop method' and is used to COPY data in Windows.





Hope this helped :]
Reply:it is better to transfer the files to an external hard drive since flash drives have smaller space compared to your hard drive. just select the files you want to transfer then copy / cut - paste it to your external hard drive. just remember that program files especially shortcuts and executables may not work well since you changed their address. so it is advisable that you transfer user made files only like .doc, .ppt etc and just uninstall-reinstall the programs on another hard drive.





to transfer files, you can simply ctrl+a to select them all, highlight all of them or pick the files while holding on ctrl button. then just ctrl+c (copy) or ctrl+x (cut) them then go to your external hd, and press ctrl + v (paste)
Reply:I stay with the original sentence :


How do I transfer my entire hard drive contents to a flash drive?





Miray Software HD Cloner is a non brainer. Amazing program i even can boot from the USB (if the cloned HD was bootable)
Reply:This will primarily be an issue of size. Most flash devices are not large enough to hold the contents of your drive. Most of your user data is in:





Windows: %USERPROFILE%\"My Documents"


OS X and *nix are in "~", OS X clearly indicates which folder is your home directory (hard to miss).





The sum total of your profile directory will be a smaller footprint than the entire drive.





You need to compress your home directory or use a backup program (ntbackup on windows to a a BKF file), or you could enable (if on windows) NTFS/filesystem compression on your target device. Any way this is done, about half the size of your home directory will be at a minimum what is needed on the flash device.





Once you are sure your home directory will fit, then use a utility like WinZip/7-Zip, or WinRAR, NTBackup or use compression and copy the files there.





The main problem with this is there is likely more data that you need than just what is in your homedirectory, possibly MP3s, videos and other assorted data files.





For Windows XP, here is a decent Microsoft article on how to use Backup on Windows XP





http://lb1.www.ms.akadns.net/windowsxp/u...





Good luck, and remember to backup and copy, don't move.
Reply:Drag and drop - you can drag files and folders as you see fit. Use Windows Explorer - it is a lot easier.