Backing Up Your Files in Windows

One of the things I would advise you to do on a regular basis is to back up your data files. You would appreciate the importance of backups once you find yourself a victim of a hard disk crash, or some other problem in which your PC fails to boot up. If you have a backup, getting back your data won’t be a problem. If you don’t, you’d wish that you’d perform a backup while there was still a chance.

You won’t have an excuse for doing this task either, as both Windows XP and Windows Vista come with their own backup tools, which are adequate tools for backing up your data and system files. You can even schedule your backup jobs so that they’ll run on a regular basis, without you triggering them. There are other free tools that you can use for this purpose, but I’ll discuss them in another article.

To perform a backup of your system and/or data files, do the following:

1. Go to Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Backup. This will open the Backup program.
2. By default, the Backup program runs in Wizard mode. You can change this by clicking the Advanced Mode link in the Backup and Restore Wizard’s first page. But for purposes of this article, and since this tutorial is for beginning Windows XP users, we’ll use the Wizard mode in this article.
3. Click Next to go to the next page, where the Back up files and settings option is selected by default. Since we’ll be performing a backup, we will leave this as is.
4. Click Next.You’ll be ask what you want to back up. You can back up your documents and settings, everyone’s documents and settings on the computer, all information on the PC, or you can choose what files to back up.
5. Select Let me choose what to back up, then click Next.
6. Select the directories and files you want to back up, then click Next again.
7. Select where you want to save the backup, type a name for your backup, then click Next. You can save your data to a floppy disk, to another directory on the same PC, to a networked directory, or to other media such as a removable hard disk or flash disk. I would recommend saving your data to removable media.
8. On the next page, you can specify additional backup options by clicking Advanced. I would advise you to use these advanced options after you’ve run your first backup. For now, let’s just continue with the regular backup.
9. Click Finish. The backup will then run. A message informing you that the backup has been completed is displayed once the backup process is finished.

When you need to restore the data, just run the Backup program again, but this time, choose restore data rather than backup data on the second page of the wizard.

The advanced options in the Wizard mode allows you to specify the type of backup (normal, copy, differential, incremental, daily), verify data after backup, disable volume shadow copy (allows open files to be backed up), append the backup to an existing backup set or overwrite an existing backup, and run the backup immediately or schedule it for later.

When you’ve become more familiar with the backup process, you can try experimenting with the Advanced Mode of the Backup program. This is similar to the Wizard mode, except that you specify settings for your backup through a normal Windows application, rather than a wizard.

The backup utility also has an automated system recovery wizard, which allows you to set up a two-part backup of your system, one part comprising your system settings saved to a floppy disk, and the other comprising your system partition.

Performing a regular backup is essential if you don’t want to be left hanging when your PC conks out for one reason or another. So, always backup your system and data files.

Want some help? We recommend Norton Ghost.

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