JGGS said:
Hi
I have a Dell laptop, which has a pre-installed version of Windows XP Home
on it. The Backup utility available in this edition is not installed by
Dell and since they don't give you a OS disk when you buy you can't
install it that way. I have made numerous attempts to contact the
appropriate dept. there but to no avail so far. I read in this newsgroup
of a site from where I can download the XP Upgrade utility and this I did
yesterday. Unfortunately it won't install unless you allow it to make a
start up floppy disk at the same time. I can't, because there is no floppy
disk drive on my laptop!
Can anyone help?
Thanks,
Jay.
Your post talks about XP's native backup program (ntbackup) but then you
mention this XP upgrade utility. What exactly is that? Here is a link
where you can download ntbackup.
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#backup_home
Ntbackup is a legacy app ported from widows NT. There are other, better
backup solutions. It's one advantage is that it's free. Ntbackup cannot
backup to DVD and will only backup to CD if other 3rd party CD burning
software is available and even with that it will not span CDs, i.e. one CD
is the limit, which is not very practical. It is geared toward tape drives
or other hard drives. It will work ok in backing up to an external hard
drive (or network drive) and restoring individual files / folders is ok, but
if you need to restore the complete drive it's cumbersome. XP must be
installed first. If you have XP Pro, Ntbackup has an ASR feature (Automated
System Recovery) which makes this restore of a boot/system drive easier but
still it takes much longer than an imaging program, and I never got it to
restore my system to full functionality as it was when the backup was made.
It also mandates that a floppy drive be available. One floppy disk is
created in the ASR process and there is no way around that. ASR is not
available on XP Home addition.
There are several other approaches for backup. One is to use an imaging
program. This makes an exact image of the partition which can be saved on
CD/DVD or to another drive - internal or external. Imaging to an external
USB 2.0 / Firewire drive works well. Then occasionally burning an image to
DVD gives you redundancy. Restores can be done of the entire partition or
individual files / folders. These work well and make it easy to recover from
a drive crash. Examples of this are:
Norton Ghost 10
Acronis True Image
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
CasperXP
The second option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's PC
BackUP, Sonic's Backup MyPC or SecondCopy from
www.centered.com. There are
other backup programs out there as well. This can do a complete backup or
backup individual files and folders to DVD/CD and other drives.
Another is simply copying data files to a CD. Zip them up to make them
smaller if you want.
