Keeping Your Data Safe

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has finally given users pervasive and reliable backup and restore solutions for both data files and the entire computer. You can use the File and Folder Backup Wizard to copy your important files and folders to a safe location, the Complete PC Backup tool to create a system image that can be used later to restore a broken PC, and the Windows Backup Utility to enable automatic data backups or restore data backups or system images. There’s even a cool new feature borrowed from Windows Server that will help you recover old versions of data files if you save the wrong version, and an updated version of System Restore that can help your PC “go back in time” and remove bad drivers or applications. You may never need to turn to a third-party backup and restore utility ever again.

Different Backups, Different Goals Now that you’ve moved to digital storage for your most valuable data, it’s time to start thinking about creating backups, which are copies of your original data that should be kept elsewhere for safe keeping. Many people don’t even consider backing up until the unthinkable happens: A hard drive breaks down, literally taking all the data with it, or there’s a fire or theft. However it happens, you should be prepared for the worst. This is all the more important because many people now manage both their professional and private lives on their PCs. It’s one thing to lose this week’s meeting agenda, but what will you do when a hard drive crash takes away the only copies you had of five years’ worth of digital photos? Given the almost complete lack of decent backup solutions in previous Windows versions, you may be surprised to discover that Windows Vista offers an almost mind-boggling suite of backup and restore solutions, each aimed at a different need. Best of all, Vista also includes a friendly front end to all these capabilities, so that even the most non-technical person can get up to speed quickly. Before we get into that, however, let’s examine the various types of data safety facilities that Windows Vista supports.

Data Backup If you think of your Documents folder as the center of your data universe, and keep an elaborate series of folders and files there, then you’ll understand the necessity of backing up these crucial files on a regular basis. To this end, Windows Vista supports both automatic and manual data backup options, enabling you to choose which files to back up and when. You can then restore your backups at any time to recover previous versions of documents, or to replace a file you may have accidentally deleted.

Complete PC Backup There’s nothing worse than discovering that you need to reinstall Windows for some reason. Not only do you have to take the time and effort to get the operating system installed, but then you have to make sure you have drivers for all your hardware, find and reinstall all the applications you use regularly, reload all your personal data, and reconfigure all of the system’s options so that it’s exactly the way you used to have it. Rather than go through this rigmarole, you can use a new Windows Vista feature called Complete PC Backup to create what’s called a system image or snapshot. This image contains the entire contents of your PC, as it was the day you created the image. If you need to recover your entire PC, you can simply restore the system image and get right back to work.

File Recovery Windows Vista offers the following two excellent ways to recover lost files:

Volume Shadow Copy: If you want to recover an older version of a document, perhaps because you made an edit in error and then saved it, you can use this feature to access previous versions of the file.

System Restore: If you make a change to your system that renders the PC unstable, such as installing a bad driver, you can use this feature to return to a previous time period, or restore point. When you reboot, none of your data has been changed, but the rest of your system configuration returns to that of the day and time the restore point was first made. Add all that up, and what you have is the makings of a full-featured data recovery software suite. Amazingly, Microsoft provides all of that functionality in Windows Vista for free. Let’s take a look.

Using the Backup and Restore Center

Although the various data recovery tools are available scattered through the Windows Vista user interface, there is a single application, the Backup And Restore Center, that provides a handy front end to all of them. Shown in article 21-1, this application helps you both back up and restore files on your PC. Because the Backup And Restore Center basically sits in front of most of the other data recovery functions included in Windows Vista, we’ll use this as the obvious starting point for most of the data, file, and system backup and restore features we discuss below. The Backup And Restore Center can be found in the Start Menu under All Programs -> Maintenance.

Backing up Data If you’d like to create a data backup, you can use the Back Up Files Wizard, which is available from the Backup And Restore Center. To do so, launch the Backup And Restore Center and click the Back Up Files button. This launches the wizard, shown in article 21-2. The wizard is a friendly interface to Backup Status And Configuration, which you can also access separately if you’d like. In the first step of the wizard, you must choose a location to store the backup. The amount of space you’ll need, of course, is based on the amount of data you will be backing up. You can save a backup to an internal or external hard disk or other storage device, a recordable optical disk (typically a writeable CD or DVD), or a network share. You cannot back up to a disk or partition you are backing up. That is, if you are backing up data from the

C: drive, you cannot save the backup to the

C: drive. In the second step, you select which disks (or partitions) to include in the backup. If you only have a single disk (or partition), this will be pretty simple, but many people are using multiple disks and partitions, so the wizard gives them the option to include those as well. In the third step, you select which types of data files you’d like to back up, 21-3. You can choose between picture, music, videos, e-mail, documents, recorded TV show, compressed files, and other data files. Although the wizard doesn’t offer any way to fine-tune exactly which data file types to back up, one thing you won’t have to worry about is it missing anything. As long as you leave every data file type checked in this step of the wizard, Windows Backup will be overly thorough and backup all known data types plus virtually anything it can’t recognize. If you’re running the wizard for the first time, it will now alert you that this first backup is what’s called a full backup. That is, it will backup all of the data file types you specified on the drives or partitions you selected. If you’d like, you can now configure Backup Status and Configuration, via this wizard, to make regular partial backups that include files that have changed since the first full backup. As seen in article 21-4, you can determine how often these partial backups occur and on what day and time. If you set up an automatic backup schedule now, Windows Vista will monitor your PC usage and prompt you to perform occasional full backups over time as well. Now you’re prompted to start the backup, which runs in the background. As the backup runs, a small Windows Backup icon sits in the system tray, where you can view the status of the backup’s progress if you’d like. The Backup utility in Windows Vista uses standard ZIP files to store its backups, so if you need to recover the files from a non–Windows Vista–based PC, you’ll have no problems. Backups are saved to a folder on the backup device named in the form of Backup Set–date–unique identifier, and if you drill into those folders, you’ll find a Backup Files folder full of ZIP files. These files contain all of your data backups. You can create multiple automatic data backup schedules this way if you want. For example, you may want to back up different drives or data file types at different times or with different regularity.

Managing Backups If you want to manage the various backups you’ve created, you can access Backup Status and Configuration directly. You will find the Backup Status and Configuration shortcut in the Start menu: It’s located in All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools. Either way, you’ll be presented with the Spartan Windows Backup interface shown in article 21-5. From this interface, you can change the backup settings for an existing backup, start a new backup, or enable and disable automatic backups all together. You can also access the restore and system image functionality that we’ll examine later in the article. If you click Change Backup Settings, you’ll return to the Backup Files Wizard, where you can change any of the settings you previously configured. The Back Up Now link enables you to manually trigger a backup, which you may occasionally need if you make a lot of changes to data files well in advance of your next backup. Finally, the Change Backup Settings link lets you configure automatic backups or start a new full backup.

Restoring Files To restore files you’ve previously backed up, access the Backup And Restore Center again, and then trigger one of the following two types of data restore operations:

Basic Restore: Restores all of the files and folders you backed up previously.

Advanced Restore: With this type of restore, you can perform more advanced restoration tasks, such as restoring only files from the latest backup, restoring files from a particular backup, or even restoring files from a different PC. Follow these steps to trigger a restoration process:

1. Click the Restore Files button in the Backup And Restore Center.

2. The Restore Files Wizard appears, allowing you to choose between files from the latest backup or files from an earlier backup. If you choose the former option, you will restore the files you most recently backed up, whereas the second choice enables you to navigate through a list of the backups that have been performed and choose the one you want. Either way, you can then choose between restoring all backed up files or browsing or searching through the selected backup to find only the file or files you need.

3. Choose where to restore the files. You can restore in the original location, which is the default, or select a different location. If you select a different location, you also have the opportunity to create a unique directory structure that emulates the directory structure of the original backup.

4. Start the restore process. If restoration will cause files to be overwritten, as it will if you choose to restore the files to their original location, you’ll receive a standard Windows Copy File dialog box, 21-6. This dialog box enables you to overwrite the existing file, keep the existing file, or keep the existing file and rename the restored version.