Cloning the hard drive using something like Ghost is the safest. Many older machines may require you remove the drive and do the clone on a desktop. These adapter cables are cheap and easy to get. A lot of work, you don"t want to do this too often. A mix of backup options might work better, such as a cloned drive and some usb hard drive backup program into a folder on the backup(cloned) drive, 2.5 inch usb enclosures are also cheap.
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