Automatic Backup On Vista
Windows vista contains automatic backup software for you to use. It does an incremental backup, the versions of Vista Ultimate, Vista Business and Enterprise have the option of backing up the entire computer by doing an image. It also has the ability to recreate the machine on new hardware, thus minimizing the downtime with a computer failure. Here we explain the usage of just the incremental backup which is available on all the widely used versions of Vista.
Start ... Goto Control Panel ... Backup and Restore Center
Click on backup files.
Select where you want your backups to go to. The most seamless option is to backup to an external hard drive that way it can be connected all the time rather than with DVD burning where there must always be a DVD in the drive otherwise the automatic backup will fail. If you do not see the disk drive after connecting this click on refresh in the drop down box. Alternatively if you have another computer that is networked to this one you could use that to backup, in this case you would use the network option, of course this requires that the other computer be on at the time of the backup.
Choose what data you want to be backed up.
Choose when you want the backup should occur. Note that generally the backup will slow your machine down when it is occurring, so it is helpful to run the backup at a time that you are not using the computer, also the very first time you backup it will do a full backup so best to set this off in the evening after work has finished as this will take a long time depending on how much data you have. Your computer must be left on during the backup period as otherwise the backup will not occur.
Restoring data
First in Vista there is a simple method for retrieving an overwritten file. You can use the Shadow Copy feature, which allows you to get a previous version of a file. Also if a file was accidentally deleted then there are some other data file recovery options.
To restore in Vista it is simply a case of going back to the backup and restore center and selecting restore, then choosing the backup to restore to. Note that when you restore to a backup it will put the files back in that state, and if you have any files that you do not want to be reverted you should copy them somewhere else.