When trying to use the wizard, it does not give me the option to back
up to my external hard drive, yet some of the postings I have read on
this board indicate that you should be able to back up to an external
hard drive. What can I do to make the backup utility recognize my
external hard drive??
That sort of depends. As a rule it's going to be a pain to do so.
Backup will only back up to tape or to an internal drive, so unless your
system things your external drive is an internal drive, it won't do it.
What many do is backup to a folder on their internal drive and then
copy it over to the external drive.
Backup also will not compress files; so the backups take a lot of
room. To get around that it's best to copy them to a compressed folder
(set up in the folder's Properties window). Or use Winzip or whatever
afterwards to compress it; XP's compression is also minimal compared to
other programs.
AS LONG AS you aren't trying to back up your operating system, or the
whole C drive, Philo's advice to just copy the stuff over to the
external drive is valid too. To back up the operating system you need
something that uses "shadow copy" services which Backup (actually
ntbackup.exe) does. Other programs cannot back up the files that are in
use where Backup can.
But if it's only data, it doesn't matter how you do it.
My choice for what I know of your situation would be to use Backup to
back up your OS, but that's not near as important to do as is your data,
much of which would take eons to duplicate if it could even be done.
Then for your data, assuming you structured it all under the My
Documents folder, all you'd have to do is backup, in any way you wished,
the My documents folder and everything in it. Backup can do that quite
easily, though, and has defaulted to skip things like t he systme
volume, etc..
Another thing backup will do for you, and which can be valuable, is back
up the System State. It's a check box in the explorer like window and
easy to do (without the Wizard).
The System State contains the whole REgistry and all system files that
it takes to boot and support getting the computer running. So if a
"last known good configuration" say should fail, you sill have a System
State you can restore to get things working again.
Normally I stay away from 3rd party apps whenever I can but Ghost and
True Image are two excellent imaging programs for backing up that are
easy to use, and reliable but do cost a bit. There are others too that
cost less but I have no experience with them so I cannot personally
recommend them. At the moment I'm using Ghost 14. They're at Symantec
and Acronis resp..
Also, if you're only backing up data and not the OS, Winzip's latest
incarnations have "jobs" you can program to do backups with. The good
thing about Winzip is that your data is compressed at the same time it's
backed up. IMO winzip for data and ntbackup for the OS are a good set
of tools. Imaging backup software is the best. They are all reliable.
HTH
Twayne
