Thank you Allan, Dusty, brentbmwh and patio for your replies.
Also see this discussion.
Dusty led me to a discussion about disk imaging in his post, in fact patio's suggestion there, was for Acronis True Image or Macrium Reflect and with such overwhelming support and recommendations from Allan and patio for them both, I am exploring which I will use. Dusty had also recommended XXClone, so, also a concideration.
Wouldn't you know it my 200 Gig external has blown the power supply.
(it never rains... It pours!! )
Thank you too Dusty for reminding me of the additional space required. My drive only has the one partition that I know of so all good there I think and once I get a replacement power supply, my 200 external should be OK.
I like the idea also though, of having a disk copy for a backup that I can store off site, (just in case), so XXClone maybe what I might use there. That requires me to get a physical hard drive though?, of at least the same size consumed on the current hard drive in my Dell computer? ( So that is about 250 Gig plus 15%= (a silly number) say 300 Gig drive). They dont make one, so a 500 Gig then should do it.
brentbmwh, I have winrar already... never used it though. I'll have a play around with that and see where I end up. Thank you for your post on it.
It seems easy enough, even ImnoGuru might be able to do that. I wouldn't ordinarily consider it because I know nothing of winrar.
I downloaded Macrium reflect so far, so I'll have a go with that one first.
Thank you all, I will do a bit of work on these suggestions and let you know how it turns out.
(Should go well... I have good instructors hehehe.)