Automated System Recovery, what it does

[nomenclator]

The ASR wizard says it backs up your system files, and
that after you do an ASR backup, you should do another
backup for your data files, because ASR doesn't do those.
Nevertheless, when I looked at the Restore catalog for
the files backed up by ASR, it was seemed clear at all my
data files, in the My Documents section, were backed up.
Plus all my program files. It seemed like it backed up
every single file on my computer. So why should I need to
do a second backup of data files? It makes no sense.

 

[Thorsten Matzner]

The ASR wizard says it backs up your system files, and
that after you do an ASR backup, you should do another
backup for your data files, because ASR doesn't do those.
Nevertheless, when I looked at the Restore catalog for
the files backed up by ASR, it was seemed clear at all my
data files, in the My Documents section, were backed up.
Plus all my program files. It seemed like it backed up
every single file on my computer. So why should I need to
do a second backup of data files? It makes no sense.

The ASR will backup the data on the system partition, because this
partition is reformatted during the restore process. Therefore the
recommendation is for systems with more than one HDD partition, but
also you may be better off creating an extra backup for the case that
you do not need to restore the whole ASR backup.
Note: ASR will not work with Windows XP Home Edition. You can backup,
but not restore the data here.

 

[nomenclator]

TM responds "Therefore the
recommendation is for systems with more than one HDD
partition, but
also you may be better off creating an extra backup for
the case that
you do not need to restore the whole ASR backup."

I still don't understand why I would be better off
creating an extra backup. Not needing to restore the
whole ASR backup does not seem to explain why I need
another backup in additon to the whole ASR backup. The
ASR wizard unequivocally says that you should do another
backup, in addition to the ASR backup, a backup of your
data files, because ASR doesn't do a backup of your data
files. But clearly -- it DOES do a backup of your data
files. This seems like plain ordinary MISINFORMATION
being provided by the wizard. It makes using Window XP
Pro VERY CONFUSING. I am still confused.