Vista Home Premium Backup

[JamieMac]

Hi,

Probably a simple problem but man is it frustrating me!
I have a Vista Premium on a laptop and I have set a nightly back up of most
of my file types to my D: drive. Problem is that after about 5 days it says
its full.

Now I woul dhave thought there should be a way to do a sort of rolling back
up so that it keeps say a few days worth and then overwrites older backups
thus not filling up the drive and then refusing to do any more backups?

Any help MUCH appreciated. It seemed so simple?

Cheers,

Jamie

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Delete the existing backups and Backup again. The purpose of backups is to
have a current up to date copy of your data.

 

[JamieMac]

Thanks Andre for your reply.

To confirm i understand this correctly. There should on ever be one copy of
my Laptop back up. If I am seeing other copies then I should delete them.
The vista backup (on premium) does not save older copies?

Thanks,

 

[Charlie Tame]

JamieMac,

"If" you have important stuff you cannot afford to lose the best option
is to buy a system like Acronis True Image. There are others, a company
call 7-tools make one I think and you can search on Google but many here
know and trust Acronis.

That allows you to make a master backup and then do incremental backups
that simply record changes - you do not have to keep saving the whole
thing. You can also make a clone of your drive so for example you
install Windows fresh and save the clone copy - any time you have
trouble you can get back to that starting point.

You can also use a removable drive, or send to a networked computer etc.

For things like pictures and documents simply copy them to a DVD or CDs
once a week / month / whatever, it never hurts to have more than one
copy - hard drives DO fail from time to time and if you only have one
than keeping a full backup or clone on that same drive is good but
certainly not perfect, two drives is a better answer - and just because
you have two partitions (say C and D) may not help if they are on the
same drive.

I would NEVER rely on the built in backup functions on any Windows
system, you can hit permissions trouble and all kinds of things, and
this may not matter if you only have passive files like docs and
pictures or music etc and are prepared to reinstall the OS but if you
get OS trouble you can't expect the OS to rescue itself.

 

[JamieMac]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for your comments. As it happens I use TruImage for my XP laptop and
it's generally quite good although struggles a lot with using my Maxtor NAS
as a backup destination.

My query about the Vista premium backup functions were because both my wife
and a friend of mine have had random problems with Vista backup saying 'not
enough space' when there is evdiently plenty. Bit strange went their daily
backup seems to run fine for a few days and then suddenly appears to runout
of space. That's what made me think it was doing some kind of incremental
(or even consecutive) backups as opposed to the overwrite behaviour that
Andre mentioned in response to my first posting.

 

[Charlie Tame]

Well I can't see a reason for what you describe with the MS backups but
am probably the least qualified person ever with it so can't comment. I
wonder if it demands some sort of "Clean" disk space and can't use
something on the the drive. Sounds weird but no weirder than the
existing problem. Some disk ops do seem to take forever so maybe it gets
timed out and the lack of space error is because the backup just
"Assumes" that taking more than x minutes = a disk too full.