Nothing you do with a computer will ever be as important as making a solid backup. Hard drives crash, and when yours does, unless you have a backup you’ll find yourself facing expensive data recovery services or worse: lost data.
From Wired How-To Wiki
Windows users looking to back up their documents and media have many options, including a very nice built-in back up program that ships with both Windows XP and Vista. Regrettably, the program is somewhat buried, so many users aren’t familiar with it.
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Depending on your needs, the built-in option may be sufficient. If you’d like an option with some bells and whistles not found in Microsoft’s program, numerous third party apps have got you covered.
What You’ll Need
1) A Hard Drive. Grab a secondary hard drive of equal or greater capacity to the machine you want to back up.
2) Software. You can use one of the programs Microsoft ships with its operating system, or you can use one of the apps listed below.
Using Windows XP’s Built-in Option
If you use Windows XP Professional, Ntbackup.exe, Microsoft’s crypticly-named backup utility should already be installed. If you’re using XP Home Edition, you’ll need to grab your original install CD.
Pop in the XP Home install CD and at the “Welcome to Microsoft Windows XP” screen, click “Perform Additional Tasks.” In the resulting window, click “Browse this CD.” This should put you in Windows Explorer where you’ll need to double-click the “ValueAdd” folder, followed by “Msft” and then “Ntbackup.” Then, just open Ntbackup.msi to begin installing the Backup utility.
Once you have everything installed, follow these steps.
1) Click the Start menu and navigate to All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup to launch the backup wizard.
2) Once in the Wizard, you’ll need to click through the opening page and choose “Back up files and settings” on the second page.
3) On the following page you’ll be asked what you want to back up. For most people, backing up the “My Documents” folder should be the minimum. If you have multiple users, you’ll want to select the “Everyone” option.
4) From there you can select which folders (if any) to exclude, choose a kind of backup and the location, then click “Finish.”
5) To set up a schedule for future backups, follow all these steps, but don’t click “Finish” on the last page of the Wizard. Instead, hit the “Advanced” button and chose “Later.”
Using Windows Vista’s Built-in Options
For Vista users, the process is very similar to XP, but there are two different backup programs available depending on the version of Vista you’re using. Automatic File Backup is available in almost all editions of Windows Vista. It’s not in Vista Starter Edition, and it has only basic functionality in Vista Home Basic.
Windows Complete PC Backup is available in the Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions of Vista, and it performs a complete, image-based backup of the entire computer. Note that neither of Vista’s offerings support tape drives, so make sure you have a hard drive handy.
Other Software Options
If you’d like to make a clone of your drive, SyncBackSE offers some nice options for a reasonable price ($30). There’s also a 30-day trial available.
SyncBackSE features some fine-grained controls, and it can even back up to an FTP server with compressed files. It also lets you set commands to run before and after backups, and it will e-mail you in the event of a backup failure.
Acronis True Image Home ($50) is another popular solution. With Acronis, you can clone your drive and recover particular files in archives — just like in Windows Explorer. You can also restore the whole system. Acronis has support for Windows Vista.
Another option is NovaBACKUP ($50) which supports Windows Vista and offers backups to nearly any storage format. It also has scheduling capability and file integrity verification built-in. NovaBACKUP can create a Disaster Recovery CD that can be used to boot an unresponsive system, but note that this feature is not currently supported in Windows Vista.
You can also try Backup Platinum ($67). This program makes a reserve copy of your critical data virtually to any type of storage media: hard or USB drives, CD-R/W or DVD±R/RW media, FTP server or Local Area Network. 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP compression on the fly are available to keep your backups small and secure. Built-in CD/DVD engine allows you to erase the rewritable disk before burning and automatically split large backups to several parts using disk spanning. The program is based on multi-threaded file-processing engine and creates detailed logs of all operations. It also can run in service mode under NT-based systems to execute scheduled tasks even when nobody is logged in.
Online Services
There are also websites which offer to backup your data to their servers, e.g. Xdrive, Carbonite, Mozy. Several of them were reviewed by David Pogue. There are some advantages to using online services – it is easier to set up, because you don’t have to buy the hard-drive and connect it to your computer. Also it removes inclination to store more data on the new hard drive instead of using it for backups. It is also possible to find free services, if you need to backup only small part of your data. There also disadvantages. The data is stored on servers belonging to other companies, so you have to trust them not to peek into your data or not care if they do peek. They can also be more expensive in the long term, as you need to pay annual fee for most services. Another problem is restoring data after crash – downloading your data back through internet could take days.
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