Are backups necessary?

[buchan]

Are the full backups that Vista has necessary? There was no such thing with
Windows 98. Why are they needed with Vista? To do full backups I will have
to buy an external hard drive. One more expense and more stuff on my desk.
I do backups of my important files to floppies, CDs, memory sticks and
webmail.
John

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Are the full backups that Vista has necessary? There was no such thing with
Windows 98. Why are they needed with Vista? To do full backups I will have
to buy an external hard drive. One more expense and more stuff on my desk.
I do backups of my important files to floppies, CDs, memory sticks and
webmail.

Necessary? No. What to back up is your choice.

Should you back up Windows? Should you back up your applications? Most
people will tell you no, since you can always reinstall these easily
from the original media. But I don't think the answer is so clear-cut.
Many people have substantial time and effort invested in customizing
Windows and configuring their apps to work the way they want to.
Putting all of that back the way it was can be a difficult,
time-consuming effort. Whether you should backup up Windows and apps
depends on you.


Personally, I prefer to image my entire system to an external drive.
Actually I use two such drives and alternate between them.

 

[Richard Urban]

If you are happy with your backup procedure stick with it.

Do you want to reload the system and every single application, and then
spend hours configuring all of these to the way they were in case of a major
failure?

If not, do a full system backup in addition to what you are now doing. I
would suggest TrueImage HOME instead of the Vista backup utility to create
this image.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[Adam Albright]

Are the full backups that Vista has necessary? There was no such thing with
Windows 98. Why are they needed with Vista? To do full backups I will have
to buy an external hard drive. One more expense and more stuff on my desk.
I do backups of my important files to floppies, CDs, memory sticks and
webmail.
John

A lot of people misunderstand the purpose of backups. There are many
kinds.

A so-called full or "system backup" usually makes an image of some or
all of your system thus making it possible to restore your computer to
a state it was prior to some disaster that prevents Vista from
starting or some other major failing. This involves making a mirror
images that either gets copied to some secondary hard drive or burned
to a series of CDs or DVDs. Better software packages that do this
allow you to retrieve some or all of the files contained in the "image
file" selectively. This process is time consuming and can take tons of
room to store. It also can be very dangerous in that you may come to
rely on this "image" which in most software is just one giant file. If
this mirror image file itself gets corrupted, then you may lose your
entire backup or major parts of it. Murphy's law being what it is, you
always lose what you need most. Generally I avoid this kind of backup
for this and other reasons.

A data backup for most users is more practical. This involves copying
only your data...what you can't easily duplicate or replace if
disaster strikes. The argument here if disaster strikes, you should
have all your applications and Windows itself on their original
CDs/DVDs to restore them from if you ever have a major system failure.

So you save time just backing up your spreadsheets, any important
correspondence, photos, home videos, etc.. If you download software
from the web and have no hard backup of it, then include that category
as well. Many good software packages that will take care of this kind
of backup fairly fast since the average user probably only has several
GB's worth of data. In fact you don't really need any software at all.
Just make copies. Again should be backed up to some separate hard
drive, external preferred for security reasons, or burned to CDs or
DVDs. The key to this kind of backup is to get in the habit of doing
it religiously without fail every day, week, month, whatever your pain
threshold or value of whatever you're backing up happens to be.

If you have more extensive data like I do, nearly 2 TB worth, then a
good choice is something like BounceBack. This will scan your entire
system regardless how many drives or where it is on your system and
only backup what files have changed since your last backup. The
advantage here is the process can be fully automated and you decide
which folders to backup or to skip. Even if you require backing up a
lot of files the process can run in the background while you do
something else. Something you would be foolish to do with any imaging
method.

 

[PTravel]

Are the full backups that Vista has necessary? There was no such thing
with Windows 98. Why are they needed with Vista? To do full backups I will
have to buy an external hard drive. One more expense and more stuff on my
desk.
I do backups of my important files to floppies, CDs, memory sticks and
webmail.
John

Absolutely. One of the problems with Vista is that introducing some new
element, like a new program, may seem to have gone well, only to result in
problems in unexpected areas down the road. I've had programs that won't
uninstall, mysterious hardware errors that cropped up one day but weren't
there the day before (and nothing had changed), mysteriously losing all my
restore points, etc. I do a full backup weekly, and I've had to use it more
than once.

 

[Diane B]

Absolutely. One of the problems with Vista is that introducing some
new element, like a new program, may seem to have gone well, only to
result in problems in unexpected areas down the road. I've had
programs that won't uninstall, mysterious hardware errors that cropped
up one day but weren't there the day before (and nothing had changed),
mysteriously losing all my restore points, etc. I do a full backup
weekly, and I've had to use it more than once.

I haven't used a full back-up in years. As long as you back up any info
you don't want to lose should the hard drive crash and not come back up
- then you should be ok. Whether you use floppies, CD's, DVD's,
rewritables, thumb drives. or external drives - it doesn't matter.

 

[Richard Urban]

You back up just your data. Others back up the system partition, in addition
to the data, in case of catastrophic system failure. Ten minutes get them
back to where the were at the time of the backup.

Doing what you do, you would have to reinstall the operating system,
reinstall all of your applications, activate everything that needs
activation, update all applications to the latest versions, update all
antivirus and anti malware to the latest detection definitions, install the
correct drivers etc.

Then you would spend hours getting the system and program configurations
back to the way they were before the system crashed.

That is why people do full system backups!

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[ptravel]

PTravelwrote:



I haven't used a full back-up in years. As long as you back up any info
you don't want to lose should the hard drive crash and not come back up
- then you should be ok. Whether you use floppies, CD's, DVD's,
rewritables, thumb drives. or external drives - it doesn't matter.

It most certainly does matter. My computer uses OEM Vista Business (a
Sony Vaio). I have dozens of programs installed under Vista, not to
mention dozens of up-dates and patches. I've tweaked the registry at
least a dozen times. If my system goes down, my only option is to
reinstall everything from scratch. An incremental back-up would be
useless, as I'd have to re-install every program, every tweak, every
update and every patch.

I did not do system backups under XP. I do do them under Vista. An
incremental data-only backup would be useless.