x201 recovery

[Yvonx201]

my x201 comes without a cd-rom and i didn't even consider buying one. Now i have a question. What if my computer crashes? There is a Q drive takes up about 10G of space named lenovo recovery. I guess it allows me to burn the content into a cd/dvd should i have one. i don't want to invest a external cd/dvd-rom just for burning a cd. will i be able to recover my system using other means? what if the hard disk breaks down then?

i've been using this computer for about 13 months with one service experience on the second month for a hard drive replacement. Now considering the warranty is expired, i am bit worried about this recovery function.

Thank you.

[Yvonx201]

could somebody give me some idea?

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

You can try something like Acronis True Image to backup the image of the entire hdd, and save it to an external hdd.

[ColonelONeill]

You can also hit F11 or the ThinkVantage button at the ThinkPad POST screen to directly enter the recovery environment on Q:.

[Yvonx201]

i only worry about the content in Q, it seems so important that once i lose it i cannot get the windows 7 restored to default state. how do i back up Q?

[WW2]

Lenovo provides backup software called Rescue and Recovery.  I would recommend investing in an external USB hard drive and doing regular backups with that.  When you first start using Rescue and Recovery, it will offer to make the external USB hard drive bootable.  If your system crashed or your hard drive failed, you would be able to boot to the external USB drive and then recover your software image.  The advantage of this is, if you schedule regular backups, then you would get back to the state your system was in when you last backed up.  This would be a lot quicker than starting from scratch with just the preloaded software.