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How do I back up windows

Not sure what you mean by "make a partiton to do that". Certainly don't back up your drive onto the same hard drive.

There's tons of software that will allow you to image and restore a c: drive. XP Pro, MCE, or Home can do it with the built-in NTBackup, although you'll have to first re-install Windows and update it to the same Service Pack as you're using now. Vista Business and Vista Ultimate also have disk-imaging software built-in.

Easier-to-use software includes Acronis' True Image and Symantec's Ghost, as well as StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop. All of them make exact images of the current PC and allow that image to be placed back on a hard drive by booting to a recovery CD and then restoring the image from another drive. There's a $10 offer on Acronis 11 right now shown in the "Hot Deals" Forum.

There's also freeware for doing such things, but I haven't used them.

I recommend making backups to an external hard drive or to another PC on your network. The ideal backup is disconnected and located somewhere else.
 
Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Not sure what you mean by "make a partiton to do that". Certainly don't back up your drive onto the same hard drive.

There's tons of software that will allow you to image and restore a c: drive. XP Pro, MCE, or Home can do it with the built-in NTBackup, although you'll have to first re-install Windows and update it to the same Service Pack as you're using now. Vista Business and Vista Ultimate also have disk-imaging software built-in.

Easier-to-use software includes Acronis' True Image and Symantec's Ghost, as well as StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop. All of them make exact images of the current PC and allow that image to be placed back on a hard drive by booting to a recovery CD and then restoring the image from another drive. There's a $10 offer on Acronis 11 right now shown in the "Hot Deals" Forum.

There's also freeware for doing such things, but I haven't used them.

I recommend making backups to an external hard drive or to another PC on your network. The ideal backup is disconnected and located somewhere else.
Click to expand...

Ok so with these programs I just make a copy and then How do i boot them when i want to restore? Say i got a virus, and i just want to Write over everything on the system drive
 
Originally posted by: Calculator83
Ok so with these programs I just make a copy and then How do i boot them when i want to restore? Say i got a virus, and i just want to Write over everything on the system drive
Click to expand...
You boot to a special "recovery CD", which then asks you where your backup image is stored and proceeds with the restoration.

With NTBackup, you boot to your XP Install CD and re-install XP. Then you update XP to whatever Service Pack you were at before the restore and, finally, run NTBackup on the computer and tell it to Restore your system from your backup file. NTBackup then overwrites everything with the backed-up versions.

Obvioiusly, it's easier and faster to use the programs mentioned earlier.

If you want backups that you don't have to think about, consider Microsoft's Windows Home Server. WHS does automatic daily image backups and manages them for you. You can restore to yesterdays backup, the day before yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, etc. You can buy a prebuilt WHS server (HP is the cheapest), or you can build your own.
 
Here's a running list of most of the options I've found suggested, in no particular order:

freeware as in open source:
http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

Commercial software some of which are limited capability versions that are freely given out in one version, and have more capabilities if you pay for a better version:
http://www.macrium.com/ReflectFree.asp
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/
http://www.macrium.com/ReflectFree.asp

Maybe free commercial software with limited capabilities:
These are basically limited versions of Acronis' product AFAIK.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/
"DiscWizard" is free *if* you have a Seagate drive connected to your system.
"MaxBlast" is free *if* you have a Maxtor drive connected to your system.

Popular commercial software on sale:
(actually this one below, acronis' true image home 11 is NOT free, but is $10 or so; the vnunet link is supposedly the current / best deal that still is offered -- the price depends on which links you click to buy it.. confusing, I know...)
http://acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
http://www.acronis.net/promo/ati4free/
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/d...cronis-true-image-home


Plus the good info. RebateMonger gave you on NTBackup, Vista Image Backup, Windows Home Server, et. al.

Personally I just bought a couple of the $10 Acronis True Image Home 11 copies just because almost everyone I see suggesting image backup tools for windows suggests it as a good consideration, and $10 is not a bad sale price.

If you are a little more capable of following some slightly more complex directions / usage procedures, the totally free stuff like clonezilla will almost certainly solve your problem without you spending a dime, but they're less polished / less easy to use than the commercial things that walk you through the options a little more. Actually I'd probably TRUST the quality of the stuff like clonezilla more, it doesn't have as many bells & whistles, but what it does it probably does well.

I can't comment much on what the "free / limited version" commercial products' qualities are, I haven't used them.

 
I have a quick question on backing up files as well. I previously used karens replicator on my XP sys. The nice thing about that, was that it only backed up new files and didn't re-write existing files, already saved. On my new vista ultimate sys, I realize there is a built in backup program. Is this one better than Karens and does it only backup newly created files or does it do all of them everytime?
 
As far as my OS drive goes, I don't back up - I duplicate the drive using Acronis TI's clone function. I keep these drives in mobile racks, and can boot to either of them. If one fails or gets infected, I go to the other - then clone back so I always have a good "spare tire."

Rack

This way, no restoration is ever necessary, and you can go from bad to good in the time it takes to turn two switches.
 
Originally posted by: jzinckgra
On my new vista ultimate sys, I realize there is a built in backup program. Is this one better than Karens and does it only backup newly created files or does it do all of them everytime?
Click to expand...
I don't believe there's any way to do "incremental" image backups with Vista Complete PC Backup ( the software built into Vista Business and Vista Ultimate). As such, it's not very "complete". 😛

I think that incrementally-updating image backups are the way to go as long as you have software that can do it easily and reliably.
 
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