I bought an external hard drive for backup and lo and behold, XP does not have Backup anymore; so how do I do my backups to this new hard drive?
Any suggestions? I read about ASR and that is way beyond me.
Thanks for any and all help!

Backup is installed in XP Pro.

If you purchased a retail copy of XP Home, Backup is there, its just not installed by default.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q302894
HOW TO: Install Backup from the CD-ROM in Windows XP Home Edition

That being said this is a pretty good reply:

First, I don't think that there's any really good reason to back up all
files in this way. The only good reason to do that is if you are creating
a bootable image of the drive, and MS Backup just can't do that. For the
most part, time spent waiting for a backup like that is simply wasted.

You need to be selective in what you back up - just your data files,
including the stuff MS helpfully puts in hidden folders, like Outlook and
Outlook Express mail files and the Windows Address book.

You do not need to back up programs or the Windows structures. For those,
you should either have the set of install disks collected and re-install, or
you should consider an imaging program.

And you absolutely must verify the integrity of the backup; after backing
up, restore some files to another location and be sure that they work.
After a crash is not the time to discover that the backups are corrupt.

Second, I would suggest that you not use MS Backup. There are many, far
better, easy to use, and inexpensive backup programs. I've had good
results with Backup Plus, about US$30. It produces files with a .BAC
extension which are really ordinary ZIP files. That means that there are
many reader, recovery and repair utilities should things go wrong; the
format is well understood and not proprietary. For example, simply
renaming the file to .ZIP will let it be opened in WinZip.

http://www.backupplus.net/

You can back up several machines on a small network with one copy. Simply
share folders and point Backup Plus to them. However, there is a file size
limitation, so you may need to create multiple backup tasks. Test with a
backup to a hard disk location before you back up to DVD or CD.

Backup Plus, like MS Backup, cannot create bootable images. For that, you
need a real imaging program like Acronis True Image, Ghost, or Drive Image.
These can produce a full image in a remarkably short period of time; forget
the hours you waited for MS Backup. Bear in mind that you do have to have
sufficient space *on another disk* to back up a drive.

www.acronis.com

Patrick Keenan

Thanks so much for that informed answer. That really helps me. I only back up data files, mostly embroidery designs and documents, so I think Backup will probably work for me, but I am going to look at the other one you mentioned.

"Click and Drag" that's an easy way to back up files. I don't understand why people use backup programs. If you know what exact files or folders you want to save then just copy them over to another drive! Right?

You can create a little file with commands like these to copy selected directories from your main drive (probably C to your external drive (let's say it's F:, and assume a directory named CBACKUP).


XCOPY C:\Data F\:CBACKUP\Data /Y
XCOPY C:\Documents F:\CBACKUP\Documents /Y
XCOPY C:\Letters F:\CBACKUP\Letters /Y
.
.
.
Save that as C:\BackItUp.BAT.

Now, anytime you click on BackItUp.BAT in Explorer, it will copy those directories for you. (The first time, if the directories don't exist, it will prompt you to create them. The /Y is to keep it from asking you if you want to overwrite existing files . . . of course you do!

On a monthly basis, you could rename F:\CBACKUP as F:\CBACKUP_2006Nov or some such and start a new one for December, to establish an archive.