Back up

[#1]

I have never done a full backup of my system having kept important programs and files saved to cd or dvd, my thinking being that after a long period of use there would be so much junk on the system that a fresh install would be the way to go and that's what I have done in the past however that brings me to the questions having done a fresh install plus a few important programs to a SSD 250 Gb. In the same machine I have formatted the 500 Gb HDD and want to know if I can do a full copy of the C drive to the HDD using the free copy of Macrium Reflect 7.1.

The C drive is a dual boot system linux mint 18 and Windows 7.

Even more important if I need to use the backup can I just boot from it after changing the boot order in the bios and then reinstall it back to the SSD.

I want to avoid any sort of instructions that could be used through the terminal as I would simply be copying rather than actually understanding what I was doing.

Any comments or advice would be appreciated.

A full windows install plus mint and all the other essential stuff such as drivers takes me about 4 or 5 hours to complete so final question might I be better sticking to this proceedure which for me certainly works

[#2]

Depends whether you want to clone your SSD, or copy each file to the HDD - the latter would allow you to recover accidentally deleted/corrupted files.

I use Linux to copy all files from selected partitions on a dual boot PC to transfer to several partitions on a HDD.

rsync is a suitable program to use, but others are available.

[#3]

I am looking to clone the ssd to the hdd.

In the event of some boot or other problem I would then select the hdd as the first to boot and later on clone the hdd back to the ssd.

I guess the first question to ask is this even possible ?

And if so using macrium reflect is it a easy thing to do ?

[#4]

You can do a huge amount just by booting from USB (especially if the USB has a "live" version of Mint on it).

[#5]

It sounds like a good plan to get you up-and-running quickly in the event of an SSD problem.  Any decent back-up software should allow you to clone one hard drive to another but I have never used Macrium Reflect because I have a paid-for copy of Acronis True Image.  If you try it either it will work or it won't.  It would have to be disastrously poor software to corrupt your SSD in the process.      

[#6]

One thing to note is that the cloned partitions will have the same UUIDs as the originals. The effect of this could result in the backup partitions being mounted instead of the originals (and, yes, it has happened to me, though on a single disk!). tune2fs can be used to change the UUIDs, but you would need to modify GRUB on the clone disk to use the new values if you wish to boot that set (or use a boot manager - I use one from UBCD on CD/USB).

Phil