Annie said:
I have Windows XP. I heard that u should make a boot disk and a back up disk
of your information but I just cant seem to find what Im looking for. Do I
need a boot disk for XP or just my operating system CD? Where do I go to make
a back up disk for my computer?
A boot disk is not generally needed. The XP installation CD is
bootable. As to backing up, XP comes with Ntbackup which is installed
by default in XP Pro. It's in Start | All Programs | Accessories |
System Tools as Backup. In XP Home it's not installed by default, but
it 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
Ntbackup has some limitation. 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.
One backup option is simply copying data files to a CD. Zip them up to
make them smaller if you want.
An excellent backup strategy 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
Terabyte Unlimited's BootIt Next Generation (BING)
CasperXP
Another option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's PC
BackUP or Sonic’s Backup MyPC. They are good tools. - and the evolution
of ntbackup. There are other good backup programs out there as well.
This can do a complete backup or backup individual files and folders to
DVD/CD and other drives.
