Even novice users can open the Backup and Restore Center and work their way through the wizards. To find it you can type Backup and Restore Center from the Start orb search pane, or you can open the All Programs folder, go to Maintenance, and select it from there to start the wizards.
From within the center you can do the following:
■ Back up your data files (or schedule your files to be backed up at regular intervals to ensure data protection).
■ Perform a Windows CompletePC Backup image (which creates a snapshot of the entire system, including files). CompletePC Backup is available in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.
■ Restore your files or entire PC from the backups you’ve created.
There are some improvements of the backup program in Vista besides ease of use. Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft MVP and president of MTIT Enterprises (www.mtit.com), says that choosing “where you want to store your backup files…. This is the biggest improvement in the Windows Vista version of Windows Backup over the Windows XP version of the same tool.” You can back up files to another drive on your system, to a removable drive (such as USB), a CD, a DVD, or even to another system using a shared folder on that other system. Keep in mind that you need to include the proper credentials on the other system if you use a network location.
Before you go backing up your complete system, it would be good to know what the caveats are. When you restore your CompletePC backup, you are pretty much overwriting the drive, which can be destructive to the existing contents, so keep that in mind before you decide to test this on your home system just for fun (although reports show that the process works quite smoothly, much like restore CDs that have been included PCs). It’s an emergency tool. Also, be sure you have enough disk space for the backup. Compression varies depending on the type of data you backup, so until you get a handle on how much backup space you need, assume a 1:1 backup (meaning if you have 1 GB of data to backup, make sure you have that amount of space available for your backup). With a CompletePC backup, because of the way it works, you cannot save the image to the same hard drive that holds the location of the system files. You’ll need another drive (formatted as NTFS) or a bunch of DVD’s (the more data, the more DVD’s).
