Looking for a way to use back up in Windows XP Home Edition

[BobLondonKy]

Hello,

I am looking for a backup program. Something like what came with the
earlier Windows Editions Microsoft Backup. I have searched my Windows XP
Home Edition to no avale. Cannot find a backup program anywhere. I was
most certain that there should be some kind of back up program that I could
have some control over. Would anyone know of such a program? I have heard
that there is one on Windows XP Pro. I do not have XP Pro. What I have is
the recovery disks that come with a Hewlett Packard hp pavillion 521n. I
am hoping that someone can point in the right direction. Hopefully to
Microsoft Backup, or a free ware version. Is it possible to use the old
Windows 98 SE backup on XP Home?

Thank You Very Much,

Sincerely,
Bob,
London, Kentucky

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I am looking for a backup program. Something like what came with the
earlier Windows Editions Microsoft Backup. I have searched my
Windows XP Home Edition to no avale. Cannot find a backup program
anywhere. I was most certain that there should be some kind of back
up program that I could have some control over.

There is. Backup is installed automatically on XP Professional, but not on
XP Home. If you have the complete XP Home CD, find backup on the CD, in
\ValueAdd\MSFT\NTBACKUP and install it yourself by doubleclicking the file
ntbackup.msi.

If you don't have an XP CD, you can download ntbackup.msi at
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/ntbackup.msi Also see
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=302894

However, as backup programs go, this is perhaps the poorest choice
available. My recommendation is to buy a third-party backup program, such as
Acronis True Image.

 

[Rock]

Hello,

I am looking for a backup program. Something like what came with the
earlier Windows Editions Microsoft Backup. I have searched my Windows
XP
Home Edition to no avale. Cannot find a backup program anywhere. I was
most certain that there should be some kind of back up program that I
could
have some control over. Would anyone know of such a program? I have
heard
that there is one on Windows XP Pro. I do not have XP Pro. What I have
is
the recovery disks that come with a Hewlett Packard hp pavillion 521n. I
am hoping that someone can point in the right direction. Hopefully to
Microsoft Backup, or a free ware version. Is it possible to use the old
Windows 98 SE backup on XP Home?

Thank You Very Much,

Sincerely,
Bob,
London, Kentucky

There are several 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 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.

Next is ntbackup which is installed in XP Pro but not Home. For Home if you
have the XP CD it can be found in the \MSFT\ValueADD\Ntbackup folder as
ntbackup.msi or download it from here:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#backup_home

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.

Another is simply copying data files to a CD. Zip them up to make them
smaller if you want.