homestyle

I have Vista 32 bit Home Premium... this comes with system image backup, right?

How is Vista's proprietary backup software?


And let's say I have 300 GB worth of data... if I create a backup image, how much space would I need in the other drive?

trueg50

You don't use images to back up!

There are several programs that will backup things regularly.

Link

As far as I know no OS has the ability to image it's self. Not counting "dd" bit for bit copying in linux of course.

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homestyle

Let's say I have 300 GB worth of data (games, music, documents, etc.)...

I want to backup everything in one swoop so that if something happens, I can just copy the backup to the drive and be good to go..

I though taking an image would be best. That way I can compress the 300 gigs down to 200 or so....

Quasimojo

It depends on what you're wanting to do. Personally, I get my OS installed and set up the way I want it and then use Acronis TrueImage to take a snapshot to which I can revert at any time down the road. One word of advice, however - if you use Acronis, make sure you turn off scheduled defrags in Vista for the drive where you store the image. I've never been able to successfully restore an image from a partition that Vista has been managing. They always get corrupted somehow. I allow myself about 20-40GB of unpartitioned space somplace for Acronis to use for its image repository.

For regular backups, I would either look up how to write a batch file and schedule it to archive new/changed files from select directories or find a small utility that does it for me.

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homestyle

Good to know.

I manually defrag my hard drives anyway... but still goot to know.

MESeidel

Vista Business and Ultimate comes with Image backup, called "complete PC backup".

Vista Home only got a normal backup.
It stores the data in .zip files.
And it can not backup every system file!
You can only recover this to a running Vista System.


While Vista Business Backup images can be recovered to an empty disk with the Vista DVD.

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