Home Data Backup in Windows XP

A Backup Article Contributed by Andrew Whitehead

Possible Problems with Windows XP Data Backup Facility

The data backup facility in Windows XP is developed by Veritas, and works reasonably well on a small scale. It is very basic and has next to nothing in terms of whistles and bells, which is the root of its potential drawbacks. It has no media spanning; the ability to copy the data backup file to more than one disk, or whatever your preferred media is. If you are copying only your data file this is probably not going to be a problem, if you want to copy the whole drive it may be.

A second problem is that XP data backups are not compatible with Windows 98. If this is a problem, because you have some old data backups for instance, there is a way around it - you buy the commercial version from Veritas.

Another problem that some may find is doing a complete backup on a PC with no floppy drive. As a complete backup includes creating a recovery disk, it will return an error if there is no drive to create it on.

Deciding What to Put into Your Data Backup

Deciding what files to put into your data backup will decide whether you can use the XP data backup. If you have the installation disks from all of your applications you can get away with backing up only your data files, almost all of which are stored by default in My Documents making life very simple. You might also want to backup the registry, and you should beware of applications that store their files in dedicated, non-My Documents folders. The ones to watch are anything that works on text or graphics files.

Using Windows XP Data Backup

You will find it by going through Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance, and you will see 'Backup your data'.

If this is your first time, a wizard will appear, giving you two options. The simplest to decide is wether you want to 'Always Start in Wizard Mode'. The easy answer is yes, but if you feel confident uncheck it. The other option is 'Advanced Mode' that not surprisingly offers more options.

Following the Wizard by clicking next gives two options, backup or restore. Since we are doing a data backup the choice is obvious. You now get four options of what to back up, select 'My Documents' unless you have reason not to, and click next. The next screen asks where you want the backup to go; the default is the desktop. Go with this. If you select 'Finish' now you will get a default backup.

You will see an Advanced button here, clicking this allows you to choose which folders to copy, whether it is a normal, copy, differential, incremental, or daily backup with explanations of the differences, and the options for verifying - always select this! - and volume shadow copy that allows files in use to be copied. Next you get the option to append or replace existing files, and finally run now or later.