What's a good setup for windows backups?

statik213

Golden Member
Oct 31, 2004
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I've got two harddrives on my machine (160GB and an 80GB). I'd like to have backups of my work on the spare drive in case my 'work' drive fails. I've got about 15 gigs of stuff I *need* to have backed up. In addition I want my windows settings and stuff saved as well (i.e. '\Documents & Settings' folder).

I want to use the Windows Backup Utility (I'm running XP Pro) and schedule incremental backups every night or so.

I tried scheduling Incremental backups every day and after a few days when I looked in the backup file I saw a whole bunch of duplicate copies for each of my Partitions (I have about 6 or 7 partitions)..... shouldn't the backup utility merge all of these 'copies' from the incremental backups to show the newest state of all the backed up files? In any case, the backup file started at about 5GB (I turned compression on) and slowly bloated up to about 10GB. Is there anyway I can configure windows to do a completely new backup and replace the bloated file with it after a cetain time period or somehow mix and match differential backups w/ incremental backups?

I'd like this to be a fire and go sort of thing without me having to meddle iwth the backups.
Open to suggestions or if anyone knows of good technical articles descring automated backup procedures do let me know.
Thanks in advance!