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Windows users looking to back up their precious documents have considerably more options than other platforms, including a very nice built-in back up program that ships with both Windows XP and Vista.
Regrettably the program is somewhat buried and many users aren't familiar with it.
Depending on your needs the built-in option may be sufficient, but if you'd like more options with bells and whistles not found in Microsoft's program, fear not — numerous backup solutions are available from third party vendors.
What you'll need
A secondary hard drive of equal or greater capacity to the machine you want to back up or another form of media (tape drives etc).
Some back up software, whether the default Microsoft program or one of the third party vendors listed below.
How To
If you use Windows XP Professional, Ntbackup.exe, Microsoft's cryptic name for the backup utility should already be installed. If you're using XP Home Edition, you'll need to grab your original install CD.
Pop in the XP Home install CD and at the "Welcome to Microsoft Windows XP" screen, click "Perform Additional Tasks." In the resulting window click "Browse this CD." This should put you in Windows Explorer where you'll need to double-click the "ValueAdd" folder, followed by "Msft" and then "Ntbackup."
Then just open Ntbackup.msi to begin installing the Backup utility.
Once you have everything installed click the Start menu and navigate to All Programs>>Accessories>>System Tools>>Backup to launch the backup wizard.
In the Wizard you'll need to click through the opening page and choose "Back up files and settings" on the second page.
On the following page you'll be asked what you want to back up.
For most people, backing up the My Documents folder and settings is probably suffient (unless you have multiple users in which case you'll want to select the "Everyone" option).
From there you can select which folders (if any) to exclude, choose a kind of backup, the location and even set up a schedule for future back ups. To set up the schedule, don't click "Finish" on the last page of the Wizard. Instead hit the "Advanced" button and chose "Later" and set up a future date.
For Vista users the process is very similar, but there are two different back up programs depending on the version of Vista that your using. Automatic File Backup is available in almost all editions of Windows Vista (except Starter and it has only basic functionality in Home Basic).
Windows Complete PC Backup is available in the Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions, and performs a complete, image-based backup of the entire computer.
Note that neither of Vista's offerings support tape drives.
Third Party Offerings
If you'd like to make a clone of your drive, <a href="http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html">SyncBackSE</a> offers some nice options for a reasonable price ($30). There's also a 30-day trial available.
SyncBackSE features some nice fine grained controls and can even back up to an FTP server with compressed files, allows for set commands to run before and after backups and will e-mail you in the event of a backup failure.
<a href="http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/index.html">Acronis True Image Home</a> ($50) is another popular solution and features Vista support. With Acronis you can clone your drive and recover particular files in archives just like in Windows Explorer or restore the whole system.
Another option is <a href="http://www.novastor.com/pcbackup/backup/n_backup.html">NovaBACKUP</a> ($50) which supports Windows Vista and offers backups to nearly any storage format, scheduling and file integrity verification. NovaBAKCUP can also create a Disaster Recovery CD that can be used to boot an unresponsive system, but note that it does not currently support Windows Vista.
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