Chapter 9: Backing Up Your Files with the Backup Utility

What Is Backing Up?

Backing up means making copies of your files so that you can get the information back should anything happen to the originals.

Many unfortunate things can happen to files:

• A physical disaster like fire, flood, or cat hair could destroy your computer.
• A hardware failure could make your disk unreadable.
• A software problem could erase some of your files. For example, installing an upgrade to an application program might accidentally write over the folders in which you stored the previous documents that were created with that application.
• On a business computer system, a disgruntled employee might steal, erase, or corrupt important files.
• A well-meaning roommate, spouse, child, or coworker might delete or alter files without realizing it.
• You might get confused and get rid of files you meant to keep.

Any one of these possibilities might seem remote to you. (We used to think so, until we learned better.) But when you put them all together, it's amazing how often having a recent backup copy of your files turns out to be handy.

What Should You Back Up?

Ideally, you should back up everything; but (depending on the speed of your machine, the size of your hard drive, and the type of backup medium you use) a complete backup can take a considerable length of time. Once you have a complete backup to work from, updating that backup takes considerably less time.

A backup of only files that are new or have changed is called an incremental backup. A complete backup of all files and folders is called a full backup or baseline backup.

Backing up files is a little like flossing teeth: we all know it's good for us, but few of us do it as often as we know we should. If it takes you a month or two to get around to doing a complete backup, you should consider backing up the following parts of your system more often:

• Documents you are working on Many applications put new documents in your My Documents folder or its subfolders. You may choose to put your documents anywhere you like, but for backup purposes, it is convenient to have them organized in subfolders of one easy-to-find folder.
• Databases to which you regularly add data For example, if you use Quicken to balance your checkbook once a month, back up the file in which Quicken stores your checkbook data.
• Correspondence, especially your e-mail files Letters and memos that you write are probably already in your documents folder(s). E-mail files, however, are usually stored in whatever folder you set up when you installed your e-mail program. Many Microsoft programs put your data in the C:\Documents And Settings\username folder (replace username with your Windows user account name, described in Chapter 6).

If you back up these files frequently, a hard drive disaster is much less of an ordeal. Still, nothing beats the security of knowing that you have backups of everything.

Programs are not on the list of important items to back up because you (or the person who maintains your machine) should still have the CDs that you used to install the programs in the first place. Make sure you know where the CDs are, that they're in a safe place, and that the CD serial numbers are with them. If you have downloaded programs, you might want to reserve one backup tape for the downloaded installation files. If you lose your hard disk, reinstalling all of your software is a nuisance, but not a disaster. You would, however, lose all the special settings that you have made to personalize the software for yourself. If reselecting all of those settings would be an ordeal, then you need to either back up the entire program folder, or find out which specific files contain those settings.

If you like, however, you can backup all the files on your entire system, including your programs and Windows itself. If you do this, be sure to include the Windows Registry as part of the backup.

How Often Should You Back Up?

Different sources will tell you to back up your files daily, weekly, or monthly, but the real answer is that you should back up your files as soon as you have created or changed something that you don't want to lose. You need to balance the regular nuisance of backing up your files against the possible ordeal of regenerating your creative work.

If you work on a document daily, a single day's work can be a lot to lose. System files change when you reconfigure the settings of your system or when you install new hardware or software. Only you know how frequently your databases change or how much e-mail you are willing to lose in an accident. Backing up these frequently updated files need not be as involved as a full system backup.

If your machine is part of a larger network, such as an office-wide local area network, check with the network administrator to see whether your hard drive is backed up automatically, and if so, how often. If it isn't, you might consider nagging an appropriate person about it. Programs exist that allow a network administrator to back up all the hard drives on the network automatically. Many offices do this every night, relieving individuals of the need to worry about backups at all.

What Should You Do with Your Backup Disks or Tapes?

Put your backup disks or tapes in a safe place, preferably as far from your computer as practical. Backups that sit right next to your computer may be handy in a hardware or software crash--but they don't protect you at all in the event of fire, theft, or sabotage. If your backups are magnetically stored (tapes, removable disks, or hard drives--anything but CD-ROMs), keep them away from strong magnets. You may want to store an extra backup disk or tape off-site (in a different building).

What Is the Backup Utility?

The Backup Utility is an updated version of the Windows Backup program that came with Windows 2000. It is installed as part of Windows XP Professional and comes as a separate program with Windows XP Home Edition. Its purpose is to allow you to back up and recover files quickly and efficiently using file compression techniques to use as little disk space as possible in storing your backups. It can also spread your backup files across many floppy disks or other removable media without confusing itself.

The Backup Utility can make backups from all types of Windows-compatible partitions: NTFS, FAT32, and FAT. It makes a volume shadow copy of all the files you specify, including files that are open (many backup programs skip open files). You can continue to use your computer during a backup, even storing and editing files that are part of the backup.

Another feature of the program, Automated System Recovery, helps you save and restore the system settings and configuration files that you would need if you had to restore your system from scratch. It can backup hidden system files, including the Registry.

In order to run the Backup Utility, you need to be logged into Windows as an administrative user--Owner, Administrator, or another user account with administrative privileges. If you are logged in as a non-administrative user, you can still run the program, but you can back up only your own files, and you can store the backup only on backup media that you have permission to use.

What Is a Backup Job?

Making a backup requires you to make a series of decisions: what files to back up, what device to store the backup files on, and a number of more technical decisions, such as whether to use compression or not. Ideally, you would make these decisions once for each type of backup that you regularly do (complete backup, document backup, mail backup, system backup, and so on), and then have the computer remember those decisions so that you don't have to go through them again every time you back up.

The Backup Utility handles this situation by maintaining a list of backup jobs. Its Backup Or Restore Wizard helps you define a backup job by leading you through all the necessary decisions. In the course of that process, you give the job a name. The next time you want to back up those same files and/or folders, you need only tell the Backup Utility the name of the job.

If you schedule the backup job to run later, and specify times for it to run, Backup stores your specifications as a backup job. If you tell the Backup Or Restore Wizard to run the backup job right away, it doesn't store your settings for reuse.

Backup jobs are usually stored in the D:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\Data folder (we are not making this up). They have the extension .bks (for backup specification). Backup uses Scheduled Tasks to run backup jobs on a schedule. Once you've created a backup job, there's no easy way to modify it--instead, you recreate it.