Vista - Backup Complete Computer

An excellent question Sygnus and an excellent answer Brink (I didn't know I needed to know this)

I'm a dual booter with XP and without this information a clean install could have caused immeasurable misery.
Thanks again

I thought that was the case but I needed to be sure. If you're looking for something that won't wipe the rest of the partitions get Acronis True Image 2009

You're welcome Nelly.

As Sygnus as suggested, Acronis True Image is a great choice if you need to clone the entire hard drive partitions and all.

Color me stupid. My one week old Asus G50 Vista64 crashes and burned when I tried to install an HP printer. "No problem," I thought, because my 'how-to' booklet says to merely insert the recovery DVD and select, "repair". Just like XP, eh?

Wrong.

It was a scorched earth wipe out recovery disk, and lost everything. 12 hours later, still installing programs. Then i googled this site and learned what i should have done FIRST!
Oh well, I have it now.

I backed everything to an externa 200gb drive. Is this as good as Acronis? I donn't ever want to go through this again. I also created the ISO file, thanks to another thread on this forum, so I should be ready for the next [when?] vista disaster.

many thanks

You're welcome Robert, and welcome to Vista Forums. Hopefully you will not have to many more problems.

Since you have Home Premium instead of Ultimate, you do not have the Complete PC Backup feature, but only the Backup File types instead.
A 3rd party backup program like Acronis will allow you to do a complete hard drive backup instead.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Ouch! So, I don't really have a backup?

If I had to use it, what would I lose? [not clear on what backup file types mean].

Dumb question, but I have Vice Versa Pro2 for business with volume shadow copy that copies even active files. It works like a charm for the office 2003 server. Yes, I should ask those people but perhaps you might know if something like VVPro would work?

It makes true copies of every file, not images, and not one giant compressed file.

Not really Robert. This will just create backups for the file types (ex: Documents, Email, etc.) that you have selected to be backed up. If you lose Vista then this will only restore the selected backed up files after reinstalling Vista and programs. The link in the post will show you more about it, but a true backup will create a cloned image of your hard drive. It will restore everything.

Heh, remember, you said there are no dumb questions.

With that in mind, I did make the backup per the pages shown. It's scheduled to run every 7 days. BUT, even with this, I would still have to re-install vista and all the programs?

Ergo: get acronis?

LOL, no worries Robert.

Yep, it only backs up the selected files and not Vista.

Getting something like Acronis, or Ultimate, would get you a comple Vista and hard drive backup.

I did the complete backup on my Vista Business x32 laptop and it finished properly. I stored the backup on an NTFS formatted, USB-attached hard drive. So far, so good.

I bought a new laptop that has Vista Ultimate x64 on it and I wanted to selectively restore some files, however my restore program says that there are no backup files on the USB hard drive. Now I can see them, why can't the backup utility?

I even shared the folder that the backup is in and tried to mount it using advanced restore/shared folder on the network. No joy.

What is going on? I've Googled this and I see lots of other folks with the same problem but I'm not seeing any difinitive answers. Any ideas??