system back-up...easy to restore?

Hi,

i had to reinstall Vista and to avoid this in the future i am considering an extern harddrive via the USB port to make a full back-up of everything on the computer.

How to restore it if Vista is no longer available? When you are no longer in control of the system...

Does one alter the bios so the USB port will be looked at first?
And if so can one restore every byte from the extern hard drive to the original drives.

Furthermore Windows claims that the restore can be put on other computers. I find this hard to believe when the other computer has not the same hardware setup....

Anyone who already did the restore to its original position?

Thanks

François

Hi François,

If you have the Vista Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise versions, you can use the Vista installation DVD and the Complete Computer Backup/Restore feature in Vista to do this. You just need to make sure that the USB drive is plugged in when you boot from the Vista DVD. This will show you how.

RESTORE:
Restore Complete Computer

BACKUP:
Backup Complete Computer

Shawn

thanks alot Shawn, yes Ultimate.

as usual one can count on you.

François

Your welcome François.

hi Shawn,

well the backup went smooth and fast. Unfortunately one can only backup-restore OR the full pc OR the OS and eventually some other drives or partitions. But the OS always gets restored.

I prefer to backup the OS once a week, but the data every night. In order to avoid backing up things i do not need backing up every day i am looking for an alternative.

Is there in some way a possibility to backup only data as is possible in Windows 2000 Pro.

Thanks

François

François,

You can backup file types in Vista with an optional automatic backup for when you set it to.

Backup:
Backup Files

Restore:
Restore Backup Files

The only way to backup individual files and folders is to manually copy them to the backup location, or use a 3rd party backup program.

Hope this helps,
Shawn