PDAmer said:
I cannot bring up the Backup Wizard from the System Tools menu, it appears to
be disabled. I am trying to do a full backup of my computer and make an ASR
diskette.
I need to know how to enable this wizard and/or fix the problem. Any
suggestions would be very much appreciated
Is this XP Home? If so ntbackup is not installed by default in XP Home.
If it's a retail install CD NTbackup is on the installation CD in the
\MSFT\ValueADD\Ntbackup folder as ntbackup.msi or download it from here:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#backup_home
Not that ASR backup requires a floppy drive and even with ntbackup, the
ASR function is not available for XP Home.
There are other backup solutions that are better. Ntbackup is a legacy
software program oriented toward tape drives and hard drives as the
backup media. It cannot backup to DVD nor can it backup to CD unless
packet writing software is installed and even then it can't span CDs
which isn't much good for today's large size hard drives.
There are other approaches. 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
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.
