Vista Backup - Loss of functionality?

With WindowsXP backup I could choose while directories to backup, and by
default it backup My Documents & SETTINGS. This include wall of the Office
App data under my account's "Documents and Settings".

My backup strategy was keep My Documents under 4GB (the size of a DVD) and
Create seperate folders under the root for big blocks of data like photos.
There also were kept in 4GB hucks.

I would back each up to a hard drive and the copy the files to a DVD with
Nero.

With Vista's Backup Center I appear to have two choices. My Documents or the
whole disk, and the whole disk can only go to a stack of DVD's

I just did a My Documents backup and the PST files from Office 2003 aren't
there including my mail! There appears to be no way to backup anything else!

Am I missing something, or have we lost a valuable piece of functionality
with this backup?

Hi DaveS,

No, you aren't missing something. MS has really dumbed-down the backup
utility. That is probably my biggest complaint about Vista. It's OK to add
the "easy" option UI...but why take away the ability to customize the
backup? Doesn't make any sense to me. If you want any kind of flexibility,
you need to go to a third-party application (like Acronis). I have several
spare PCs, one of which still runs XP. I use that XP machine to backup my
data on my Vista machine. A little convoluted, but it works.

Tim

"DaveS" <DaveS@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:FDB843EC-DF5D-494D-B6D2-EB6C2CCBDDD6@microsoft.com...
> With WindowsXP backup I could choose while directories to backup, and by
> default it backup My Documents & SETTINGS. This include wall of the Office
> App data under my account's "Documents and Settings".
>
> My backup strategy was keep My Documents under 4GB (the size of a DVD) and
> Create seperate folders under the root for big blocks of data like photos.
> There also were kept in 4GB hucks.
>
> I would back each up to a hard drive and the copy the files to a DVD with
> Nero.
>
> With Vista's Backup Center I appear to have two choices. My Documents or
> the
> whole disk, and the whole disk can only go to a stack of DVD's
>
> I just did a My Documents backup and the PST files from Office 2003 aren't
> there including my mail! There appears to be no way to backup anything
> else!
>
> Am I missing something, or have we lost a valuable piece of functionality
> with this backup?