Using The Windows Backup Utilities

by Jason Faulkner on Nov 3, 2009 | 5 comments

Out of the box, (most versions of) Windows ship with a backup utility which probably meets the needs of most. Realistically though, you never really hear about them as most of the information out there is for 3rd party utilities.

So to help you get acclimated with these tools, here are a couple of resources:

Guide to using Windows XP backup (note, this site is for a 3rd party product, but they give a really good guide for the XP tool)
Windows Vista / 7 backup overview

Again, these tools are nothing fancy, but they are effective for getting the job done. It only takes a few minutes to set up an automatic backup plan, so if you don’t have one already, get to it.

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http://none C Whisler
Of all the times that various articles came from you talking about the importance of “Backup” utilities built in to Windows you seem to always skip over the fact or just remark that there are millions of us out there that have and use Windows XP Home Edition and seldom even get a disk for XP when we bought our computers. For people like me who don’t want to use those 3rd party store off site programs that are relatively expensive, no real alternative is discussed in detail. I happen to use a cd and or other memory devices for my backup. What I need is a better organized way to back these up myself using a program before writing it off to a disk. Have you ever reviewed any programs of this type?

Jason Faulkner
You can try using my backup script to see if this works for you:
http://www.pcmech.com/article/windows-batch-script-to-backup-data/

http://none C Whisler
Thanks, After reading your backup script, this sounds like just what I’m looking for. Thanks again.

http://www.kptechblog.com Kyle Potts
The only downside to Windows back ups, it that it doesn’t have a great tool like rsync like Linux does. With Linux my backup routine is set up with a chron job to back up every saturday at 2 to an external hdd. Then after the backup I do a clonezilla image on all my computers.
Maybe there is something like Rsync in Windows. I never really looked.
http://www.handmadedesignerfurniture.co.uk/ Tim
Fortunately i havent faced such a problem with XP till now….but thanks for making us concerned about the type of error..
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