How to Backup Data in Windows Vista

Robbie Ferguson: —they do have a built-in backup solution which is kind of cool. So we can basically just click on your Start menu and now mine is a little different because I'm using this in a Virtual Machines so I've actually disabled a lot of the visual styles because I don’t like the way that they affect performance so I just gone up to my All Programs here, Accessories and tell me if you’ve seen this Christy, and scroll down, you're going to have this if you're on any version of Vista, now the features that is a little different if you're using like the Home Edition, but we will post information about that in our—for episodes. I've gone into System Tools, Backups, Status and the Configuration. And it is actually pretty intuitive and pretty straightforward as far as setup. Have you seen this one, Christy before? Christy Burton: No I haven't but there have been popups and I've selected to backup my system, but then it tells me that this gives no good and I've tried a number of different discs. Robbie Ferguson: So what we need to do is we actually need to setup an automatic file backup here. So I'm just going to click on that and you can follow these prompts, it is actually pretty intuitive and I do think that Windows is getting better. I can't say it’s there yet but I think we’re going to see even more intuitive work put behind Windows 7. So now it’s just asking me where I want to put my backup. So you’ll notice that it doesn’t give me—I'm sorry for my Start Menu always popping up Windows, it’s horrible for that one. It doesn’t give me any options here because I don’t have a burner and I don’t have a hard drive other than my C drive. You can't backup your C drive to your C drive because that’s not redundant at all. So you’ve got an extra copy. The only thing that you're protecting yourself against then is accidental deletion of the file because you’ve got another copy or editing a file and needing to get it back. But really, there’s no redundancy there because if your hard drive crashes, you’ll lose both copies. So windows intuitively has said, you know we’re just going to take out that risk, we’re just going to say, you know what you can't backup to your own hard drive. So it’s only giving me the option on a network because that’s all I have. So I'm going to browse my network because this is a good way to do it, I can store it on my Raid 5 controller. I can store it on my NAS storage drive, that’s Network Attached Storage. I can store this on another computer on my network just to have redundancy, just to have those files backed up to another hard drive somewhere else on my network. But certainly if you have a home server, you can use like a Raid configuration which is multiple hard drives backing up with extra redundancy. Christy Burton: Now, can I just throw in a question here? Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, for sure. Christy Burton: What about offsite record saving and privacy issues? Robbie Ferguson: Privacy issues with an offsite data backup service? Well you want to use one that is going to offer you an encrypted solution but—and we’ve actually—we have talked about that on previous shows just a little bit, getting into security with data backups and not touching on a tooth early but you go to—there has to be a promise from the company that’s doing your backups for you that they have security. Christy Burton: But if they say it’s secure, how can you be guaranteed that it’s secure? Robbie Ferguson: Well you can encrypt your files. So if those files are being sent to them as encrypted files, then even if somebody walked in to their office and took your data backup with them, they couldn’t open it because they don’t know how to decrypt it. Christy Burton: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So chances are they're not going to be able to decrypt that if you're using a good, solid encryption algorithm, so, encryption is really what it’s all about when you're looking at an offsite for sure. Just looking at this, this has brought up my network, it took a couple moments there. I'm just going to click on demo because that’s where my current system is. And just enter my password for that computer and you want to make sure that you set it to remember that password because you don’t want to have to enter this every time you do your data backup. So I've just done that and clicked on Remember Password and then it gives me access to my shared folders. So, you do have to have folders shared on that computer so be it, you know, this is going to be like just a shared folder on that computer’s hard drive. If you’ve got a Raid, you know you just share a folder and it’s going to show up there. So I've named it shared, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a shared folder, like you can name it whatever you want. So I just hit OK and that’s going to automatically save it there, click next, enter my password again for that computer. And this is got to be a login for that computer that you're connecting to, so that is like a user account. So you do have to have a password on that if you want to have security between the systems, if the computer doesn’t have a password then that’s another story. So, it makes it pretty simple here, it’s going to ask you do you want to—just with the checklist, pictures, music, videos, what do you want to backup? And it’s nice that it does like email and things like that, I think that’s pretty cool. Yeah so you just kind of let it go. So, check off the ones that you want or uncheck the ones that you don’t want. This is nice and easy again, how often you want to do this, weekly, daily, what time do you want to do it, and this is where we almost got into this with previous product. I would suggest that you run your backups at a time where it’s not going to affect your performance. If I, never on my computer during the dinner hour, perfect time to run my backup because you know I'm sitting down at the table, it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to affect my productivity. So I would set that for—for me let’s say 5:00 pm. So then next step is just save settings and start your backup. Now I've scheduled this so it’s going to go forward and this is going to do everything that needs to be done so that’s now going to run my backup and we can see that that’s created a little icon down here and that’s running. So that is the integrated system for Windows Vista and it is very intuitive for—I'm pretty impressed with it as far as integrating them to the Windows Operating System. It’s certainly better than previous offerings from like Windows XP, the stuff that comes with it. Now if you're not wanting to use a windows—like a Microsoft product for your backup, that’s fine and totally understandable. So what you can do, again, you can refer back to our previous segment on Cobian Backup. Cobian Bakup is compatible with not just Windows XP as we previously looked at in an earlier episode in the series, but it also works on Windows Vista as well. Difference there is that your Windows Vista system is going to find your user files in the user’s folder of your hard drive. I'm just going to bring up Cobian site here just so that we can see it. So when you're browsing your hard drive from Cobian, or from any backup solution whatsoever. So let’s just bring out my C drive. So in Windows XP, your documents are found in—and all your files are basically found under Documents and Settings, if you keep things where they go by default. I'm not sure where, it’s taking me there. here we go, okay so in my C drive, you can see a Users folder and this is very similar to your Documents and Settings in your old Windows XP. You see Robbie and in here you’ve got your desktop documents, favorites and things like that. So those are the things that you want to backup if you're using a program like Cobian Backup where you need to manually select the files that you would like to backup. So if I just—I will just find Cobian just by Googling it. That’s horrible how my Start Menu always pops up, Cobian Backup right there, educ.umu.se. So you’ll see again version 9 and version 8. version 8 is open source, version 9 is not. The biggest reason I think to go with version 9 over version 8 is if you use higher characters, like if you use like a different language other than English, that uses like accents and things like that, version 9 is going to support backing up those files. Version 8 might have problems copying those files in your backup so be careful with that. Use version 9 if you have files on your computer that are other than English. Cool! Does that get you started with backing up your computer? Christy Burton: I cannot wait to get started though. Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, you need to have something to backup to, like I was saying, I don’t have anything internally that I can backup to but you can have an external drive, you can have an external hard drive, you know something—I always refer back to this guy. Christy Burton: Actually, almost bought one. Robbie Ferguson: Well they're great, I mean as long as it’s bigger than your internal capacity of your computer, because you know it’s going to be able to afford that backup. Christy Burton: You can keep adding to it. Robbie Ferguson: Exactly. So that’s kind of the perfect solution, something that you can grab and take off site if you need to. Christy Burton: So what size would you recommend? Robbie Ferguson: Well it depends on the size of your internal hard drive and how many files you’ve got. So if you’ve got a 100-gigabyte hard drive in your computer and you think that you might eventually fill that up and you only get an 80-gig backup drive, well your computer is already surpassing the capacity of your backup drive. Christy Burton: Right. Robbie Ferguson: So you eventually will not be able to backup your computer because your backup drive is too small. Christy Burton: Right. Robbie Ferguson: So I would say get something that’s minimum of two times the size, I would recommend probably four times. Christy Burton: Because I do love photography. Robbie Ferguson: Yeah and you don’t want to lose that stuff. Christy Burton: Right. Robbie Ferguson: So definitely if you can afford for four times the capacity, if you got a 100-gig drive, then that means a 400-gigabyte external drive, that’s going to give you the ability not only to run a backup but also to keep redundant backups. You can use things if you’ve got one of the higher end Vista operating systems, you can use shadow Copy which basically means you're going to be able to go back in time. Christy Burton: Which is what we saw— Robbie Ferguson: Yeah so it’s going to give you the ability to actually go back over files from the past as well. So that takes up more room on your data backup. Christy Burton: Right. Robbie Ferguson: So you want to make sure that it’s bigger. Christy Burton: Well that’s good to know.