Vista home - alternative to poor backup utility?

[ferrymanr]

I have recently purchased a laptop which comes with Vista Home Premium. Got
it all set up and went to backup but found the supplied backup utility seems
very limited. Is there a way to invoke a complete backup as I had on XP and
2000 or am I forced to use a third party backup utility?
Richard

 

[philo]

I have recently purchased a laptop which comes with Vista Home Premium. Got
it all set up and went to backup but found the supplied backup utility seems
very limited. Is there a way to invoke a complete backup as I had on XP and
2000 or am I forced to use a third party backup utility?
Richard

Best to use a 3rd part application such as Acronis

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

I have recently purchased a laptop which comes with Vista Home Premium.
Got it all set up and went to backup but found the supplied backup utility
seems very limited. Is there a way to invoke a complete backup as I had on
XP and 2000 or am I forced to use a third party backup utility?
Richard

For a proper backup solution, you should look to get an external USB drive
and a program like Acronis TrueImage OR a 'One Touch' backup solution where
the drive and software come as a package.

Anything else is a waste of time.

 

[Mick Murphy]

Home versions of Vista do not do a complete system backup.
Use Acronis or something like that.

 

[ferrymanr]

Thanks to all for your replies. Acronis seems to be the answer.
Richard

 

[philo]

Thanks to all for your replies. Acronis seems to be the answer.
Richard

Best part is the free trial.
though I'm sure it will work fine...if it doesn't...at least you don't waste
any money

 

[TheDuck]

Take a look at Ghost. It has been around since DOS and works great on Vista.
It takes one hour to backup and verify my system of 120gb. Very Fast

 

[Poutnik]

Take a look at Ghost. It has been around since DOS and works great on Vista.
It takes one hour to backup and verify my system of 120gb. Very Fast

I have great experience on Vista64 HPremium
with free version of Macrium Reflect
( supports both 32 and 64b )

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Speed is similar, about 35 GB system partition (occupied size)
into 18GB compressed partition image in 14-15 minutes.

It has great restore possibility,
based on Linux bootCD with nice GUI.

There is also possibility to mount backup image as a disk
( probably R/O )

It once saved my ass when my boot disk unexpectedly died,
( SMART was OK before ) and I restored backup
to a new disk of different size and vendor.
I was able even to choose size of restored partition.

After usual partition check, Vista booted fine.