HP says I should backup my entire hard drive before sending my laptop, now, how would I back up 30+gigs of files easily?  :(

Is there a way to use my iPod?  (30 gig).  It has all of my music on it already, I'm sure I can fit most/all of my school work onto my flash drive.  But for the misc. things can I use my iPod & can I retrieve songs from the iPod?

Uh....

There is no real easy way.

Get another drive, plug it into your laptop, and use dd to copy the drive over.

Maybe if you have like 6-7 4.7gb DVD-RWs? That wouldn't be a bad idea, but it may be somewhat annoying through the long, agonizing burning process.

Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.

Anything that's hard to obtain later on, back it up. Anything you can easily get back, don't bother saving.

[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=13093.msg131890#msg131890 date=1130205992]
Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.
[/quote]I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.

[quote author=CrAz3D link=topic=13093.msg131892#msg131892 date=1130211308]
[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=13093.msg131890#msg131890 date=1130205992]
Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.
[/quote]I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.
[/quote]

Don't trust external sources. I lost ~100gb of data that way. :P

[quote author=Newby link=topic=13093.msg131894#msg131894 date=1130212852]
[quote author=CrAz3D link=topic=13093.msg131892#msg131892 date=1130211308]
[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=13093.msg131890#msg131890 date=1130205992]
Man, all you have to do is copy your documents and pirated app archives and you're set.
[/quote]I know, my pirated apps are surprinslgy few on my laptop.  The bulk of my hd is taken up by music which I can retreive from my iPod!  whoo.
[/quote]

Don't trust external sources. I lost ~100gb of data that way. :P
[/quote]It's on my laptop (which I've requested NOT be reformatted) & on my iPod, + I've checked to make sure I can retreive stuff from it...although that was only on my laptop, never tried installing the iPod to my desktop, can I even do that?

[quote author=Newby link=topic=13093.msg131879#msg131879 date=1130190022]
Uh....

There is no real easy way.

Get another drive, plug it into your laptop, and use dd to copy the drive over.
[/quote]

I had to do this at work over the summer. My boss had an aging IBM ThinkPad he wanted to upgrade the 8GB hard drive on, so we bought a 40GB drive.

To transfer, I booted into Knoppix and used partimage to copy the entire 8GB drive across the network to another computer which had enough free space. partimage has a GUI, which dd does not, and it can work with samba shares so the Windows 2000 target box could accept the partition images. Then, I installed the new drive and reversed the procedure. IIRC, partimage also let me resize the mirrored drive from 8GB to its full 40GB capacity without any data loss -- I'm not positive.

Tools: Knoppix + another computer with >= your hard drive size of space on it, plus some Googling for guides as to how to use partimage across a samba share.

In your case you will also need an external monitor to boot the laptop onto so you can see what you're doing.

hmm, wow, a little involved.  I don't think I'm gonna try that, but that's good to know need I ever actually save & transfer everything.

External hard drives are fairly cheap at best buy.

[quote author=Forged link=topic=13093.msg131898#msg131898 date=1130214835]
External hard drives are fairly cheap at best buy.
[/quote]iPod is currently function as such, I figure that can work for the 7 days

Plug in your ipod, and it'll show up as a drive.  Open the drive, and copy everything you want to save to some folder (I used notes, so I can see which files I have from the iPod's gui).  That's probably the easiest way :)