Thansk for those replies.
I am not concerned about software licences or the risk of later recovery of 'deleted' data. My principal concern is to get an accurate 'dump' of all of the personal files, images and data that exist on the device.
Tarfhead,
You're very welcome and I'll try to address your clarification below.
Here is the bare information offered by Microsoft addressing the issue you raise in Windows 7, Vista and XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971759
The important thing to watch is this paragraph:
"Important Not all applications save their files to the user folder. You should make sure that you check other applications and the location of their saved files, and then copy those files to the network location or to the removable media."
If you use only Microsoft application and/or have kept your application data files in the standard application sub-directories and/or in the "my documents" folder, it may simply be a simple matter to buy an external hard drive and drag and drop the entire lot.
If you have used unique directory locations you'll have to find these and do the same.
Other data you may need will not be in that location - I refer to Application Data, such as your e-mail correspondence if you use Thunderbird and Bookmarks
Backing up programmes may find all this but I don't trust them to do so - I do it by hand - a slow laborious process and yes mistakes can be made, but in general it supports the "no data left behind" protocol.
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In relation to automated systems, most external hard drives come with software on them which will assist you in automating your backups from the date they are installed, but you still have to set them up the first time.
In some cases you can choose a complete system restore, or else just restore a particular dataset.
This can be quite specialized work, but it can allow easy transference of entire environments from one machine to another.
If you want to look at other third party applications I cannot recommend any, but most security suites include a back up and restore facility.
This is quite a big field of endeavour so here are some useful links to help you tread warily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software
For future reference you might consider off-site back services
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_backup_service
This would seem to allow access to your data anywhere in the world you can go online and has sufficient transfer rate and no censorship - might not include China.
ONQ