Got Vista – Got Three Great Recovery Tools
ByYou all do regular backups – right?? I backup to an external drive and I also use Carbonite – a great on-line backup system.
But today, let’s talk about backup tools you already have..that is you have them if you own Vista Ultimate, Business or Enterprise. You may have discovered Vista’s Complete PC Backup, Data Backup Tool and System Restore tools. Let’s talk about each one.
Complete PC Backup – This tool allows you to make an image of your hard drive–an exact copy of everything on your PC. If you’ve ever had to reinstall windows, you know what a time drain it is to do the reformat and then reinstall not only your OS, but all your programs, files, pictures, music, etc. Using this free utility is the way to go if you need to replace a hard drive in a machine. A caution – don’t use this type of backup if you are reformatting because you think you may have a virus. Another reason not to use this method is if your goal is to get rid of all the accumulated clutter every hard drive seems to acquire.
Data Backup – This tool can be set to run either automatically or manually. Go through the wizard to set up the options of frequency, what folders to backup and if you want complete or incremental (files changed since the last time), backups. This method puts your data in a kind of ‘big ball’, i.e. the files are zipped. To restore, you have to dig down into the ‘ball’ of files. I have used this method, but have since decided to drag and drop the folders I want to backup to my external hard drive. It’s just easier for me to get a visual on what I’ve got backed up.
File Recovery – There are two tools here that offer ways to recover your data:
System Restore – if you’ve downloaded something, (a program, driver, etc.), that is not getting along with your system, you can use System Restore to restore your computer to a previous time, or restore point. Vista automatically sets a restore point each day. It’s wise to go in and create a restore point if you’re getting ready to install or change something on your system. If it doesn’t turn out, it’s easily fixed by starting the system restore process.
Volume Shadow Copy – this is a new feature with Vista. This will let you go back in time to retrieve an older version of a file. Did you save something and then realized that the formatting was all off, or perhaps someone else worked on a document and you don’t know exactly what changes were made?? Just right click on the file name and go to ‘properties’, and then click the ‘details’ tab. If this is a file you’ve saved many times, you can see the other dates it was saved and retrieve an earlier saved version. How cool is that!
In the first paragraph, I talked about the Complete PC Backup. This is not available with Vista Home or Vista Home Premium. Instead, you can use DriveImage XML, a free utility that will do the same thing. I found out about it in this excellent article by the How-To Geek. He will walk you through the process.
If anyone has any other programs/methods for backup you’ve used successfully, please comment.
