For my last Dell laptop I used "Acronis True Image Home 2011" to do this. I could boot to a thumb drive or CD and run the Acronis software from there.  However, this does not work on my new laptop as the Acronis software does not recognize the PCIe drive. Can you recommend other software that I can use to do the backup ? Free or commercial software is ok. My laptop setup procedure is very complicated and time consuming, so I like to make a number of backups that I can restore to later. I prefer software that I can boot to on a thumb drive or CD in case Windows falls apart and I cant boot into Windows to run the restore operation.