Your version of Vista determines what class of Windows Vista Backup Center you can use. Office, Enterprise and Ultimate users can backup their entire hard drive. Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium users can only create backups based on their document and file types.
This article series will explore using the Windows Vista Backup Center for the premium versions (Ultimate, Enterprise, and Business) and the home versions (Starter, Basic, and Premium). In the next part, we’ll look at setting up automated, unattended incremental updates that run in the background in the premium versions. The next part will cover creating a bootable repair DVD to use in case of complete hard drive failure. We’ll round out this series by surveying other full-backup solutions for the home versions of Vista.
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Let’s get started!
First of all, we are all aware of the importance of backing up our files and data, but many of us, including computer professionals that should know better, are less than devout about this important task.
Microsoft knows this and in Vista they did something about it.
The good news is that if you have Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, or Enterprise, Microsoft has included the most simplified, attractive, and elegant version of Windows Backup to grace Windows so far. It’s easy to set up and use, and it can back up your entire hard drive including your data and the operating system itself.
The bad news is that if you have Windows Home Premium, Basic, or Starter, you only get a subset of this functionality. The Backup Center in these versions will only do folder-based backups, not the entire hard drive. This is not a tragedy, but it does complicate things a bit.
With the exception of Dell (when this was written), the major PC manufacturers have stopped including Windows CDs or DVDs with new machines. Instead, they use a separate partition on the hard drive to install a copy of the software environment that existed on the machine when it was first unboxed. Typically, the manufacturer will then include a method of accessing this partition to start an operating system to restore the PC, like pressing a certain button on a laptop or pressing F8 during the boot process.
On a ThinkPad, it’s called “Rescue and Recovery.” On an HP PC, a similar functionality is provided called “Recovery Manager.” The thought here is either to separate the user’s data and store it externally or to provide a complete external backup to be used with a new hard drive or when a full recovery is needed.
So this leads us to the next part of a puzzle: if the hard drive fails, how does one start the computer? This is when one needs a bootable DVD to get the system restarted and attempt restoration. Rescue and Recovery and Recovery Manager know how to create a bootable DVD that will start the particular system that the manufacturer provided, so if you have been pious about doing your backups, you can restore all of your data up to that last backup.
It’s not so hot that Microsoft decided to remove the ability to create a bootable DVD in Vista, but we've found some ways around that problem.
Now let’s look at the Vista Backup Center. I mentioned previously that it’s easy to use and elegant. Here’s what it looks like. Note that there are two main choices – to back up your data files or do a complete back up of the computer.
This next image shows what types of files can be backed up if the complete backup is not selected. This is the only option offered to users of the Home versions of Vista.
We decided to do a test run to see how well the complete backup worked. We used a freshly formatted 250 GB hard drive (232 GB formatted). 195 GB were to be backed up. When starting an original backup, you’ll be looking at this dialog for quite a while:
The complete backup ran for 52 minutes on a 2.3 GHz dual-core 3GB PC. It also bogged down the machine so badly that running other programs during that time was an exercise in frustration. After starting the backup, it would be a good idea to do something away from the computer for a while.
Using DVD-Rs was an option, but the Backup Center said that between 17 and 54 DVDs would be needed. 195GB divided by 4.7GB is about 41 DVDs, so the estimate was pretty optimistic on the low side and fairly conservative on the high side.
How did it actually do? 135GB were used on the external hard drive.
Vista does not place a program on the external hard drive that can be used to start the computer or restore the system. There are two methods to do this. One assumes that the hard drive is working well enough to boot and get into Vista. Simply go to the Backup Center and select “Restore files and folders from a backup.” The other method assumes that the recovery partition on the hard drive is undamaged. The mechanism there is to press F8 repeatedly during the boot session. (If it says that Windows is starting, you were too late and will need to try it again.)
Then after restoring the operating system, you can go to the Backup Center and restore your programs and data from the external backup.
If the drive has completely failed and the PC can’t be started from the recovery partition, you’ll need one of these:
Next: Troubleshooting Vista Backup Problems