The
Windows Backup program (Sdclt.exe) is installed by default in all
editions of Windows 7. Its feature set is dramatically improved over
its predecessor in Windows Vista, which was roundly (and deservedly)
criticized for its inflexibility and for Microsoft's decision to remove
important features from the program in home editions. And it's
light-years beyond the NT Backup program included with Windows XP,
which was designed before the turn of the millennium.
Before
you can create a backup, you are strongly encouraged to run through a
brief setup routine. The purpose of this one-time operation is twofold:
to help you choose a backup type (system image, data files, or both),
and then to help you build a schedule that will automate future backups. You can save one and only one collection of backup settings.
For your first backup, you can start from either of the following two locations:
Under the Maintenance heading in Action Center, click the Set Up Backup button.
In
Control Panel, click Backup And Restore under the System And Security
heading, and then click the Set Up Backup link, as shown in Figure 1.
Note:
You can skip the initial setup if you simply want to create a one-time
backup of your system volume (an excellent idea if you've just finished
performing a clean installation with all your drivers and programs
installed and ready to use). Click the Create A System Image link in
the left pane.
The
basic steps for performing a backup are simple and straightforward. You
have to make some decisions first, which in turn dictate which tools
you use and what actions you need to take.
Select a destination where your backup will be saved. The Set Up Backup dialog box, shown in Figure 2, lists all available destinations. Note that the system volume is not included in this list.
Your choices include the following:
A separate volume on the same internal hard drive that holds your system volume We strongly advise against this option, because in the event of a physical disk failure your backup files will be wiped out at the same time as the originals.
An external hard drive
This is the simplest and best option. The external drive can connect to
your PC via a USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, or eSATA cable. You can leave the
drive permanently attached to your PC so that scheduled backups
happen regularly, or you can unplug it after the backup is complete and
then store it in a secure location such as a fireproof safe or a locked
cabinet. For extremely valuable data, consider storing the backup drive
offsite.
Removable media such as writable CDs or DVDs
This option is available only if you are performing a one-time image
backup; you can't define a scheduled backup using removable media. Windows
Backup will prompt you to swap media as needed. This option is
especially useful after you perform a clean installation and before you
add any data files.
A shared network folder This option is available only on the business editions
of Windows 7: Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise. It's an excellent
choice for file-based backups if another PC or server on your network
has ample storage space. You'll need to enter credentials that the
scheduled task can use to access the shared location, as shown here:
As we note later in this chapter, using a network location to store system image backups has one major downside: you can store only the most recent image file per computer.
Choose
a backup type. The easy option is the first one shown here: Let Windows
Choose (Recommended). This option is selected by default, and if you
click Next without changing the selection,
Windows will do the following: create a system image and save it in the
location you specified earlier; back up all local files that are stored
in libraries, on the desktop, and in default folders within all user
profiles; and create a scheduled task to repeat the backup weekly.
If you prefer to exercise fine-grained control over what
gets backed up and when, select the second option, Let Me Choose, and
then click Next. We'll describe these options in more detail in the
following section.
Create a backup schedule. By default, the Windows Backup program will run automatically, using the same settings
you just saved, at 7:00 PM every Sunday night. If you prefer to back up
more or less frequently or at a different time, click Change Schedule
on the Review Your Backup Settings page to open the How Often Do You
Want To Back Up window shown next.
Your scheduling
options are extremely limited (although you can manually edit the
scheduled task if you want an option that isn't listed here). You can
choose Daily, Weekly, or Monthly backups, picking a day of the week or
a date each month and a fixed time when the automatic backups will take
place. After the original full backup, updates to your backup set
include only files that have changed since the last backup.
After the initial setup is complete, click Save Settings
And Run Backup to perform the backup operation. While your backup is
running, the Backup And Restore Control Panel displays its progress, as shown here:
While a backup is in progress, you can click View Details to see more information and to stop the backup.
1. Customizing a Backup
If
you choose the default settings, you can be assured that all data files
in all user profiles on your PC will be backed up, along with the
contents of any local folder included in a library in any user profile.
(Shared network folders in a library are never backed up.) If the
backup destination has sufficient room, the backup will also include an
image of the system drive.
If you want more granular control of exactly which files and folders are backed up, begin setting up a new backup and click Let Me Choose when you reach the What Do You Want To Back Up window. That opens a dialog box like the one shown in Figure 3.
The
customization options here are divided into two hierarchies. At the top
of the list is the Data Files heading, which includes an entry for each
existing user account. Clear the box to the left of any entry to remove
all files from that user profile from the current backup settings. (You
might want to do this if you've created an account that you use
exclusively for testing and you're certain that none of the files it
contains are worth preserving. If you've enabled the Guest account,
you'll probably want to exclude it from backups as well.)
Although the entry for each account under the Data Files heading suggests that it includes only libraries,
that description isn't entirely accurate. When you fully expand the
list of available options for an entry in the Data Files list, you see
a selection similar to the one shown here:
Every
one of the libraries for the selected account, including the standard
libraries created by Windows and any custom libraries you've created,
is selected by default. You can skip one or more libraries by clearing
the associated check box, but it's an all-or-nothing proposition: you
can't choose to include some locations within a library and exclude
others. You might want to skip backups
for a specific library, especially if it's full of large files for
which you have a separate backup strategy. If you're already
synchronizing hundreds of gigabytes of files in the Music and Videos
folders with another computer on your network, for example, you might
leave those space-gobbling files out of your regular backup settings.
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Do
you store important data files outside your user profile? Custom
libraries can help you ensure that those files are always backed up.
Create a new library, call it Backup, and make sure it's selected in
your current backup settings. Add locations to the new library that you
want to ensure are backed up. The files themselves remain in their
original location, but as long as they're on a local drive they'll be
backed up. If you remove a folder from the Backup library, it will no
longer be backed up. Any new folder you add here, even if it's outside
your user profile, will automatically be included in your next backup.
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The entry just after the final library for each account in this list is Additional Locations. Click the arrow to its left to expand it, and you'll see that it includes the AppData
folder for the selected account, which contains data files and settings
that are typically created and managed by programs. Microsoft Outlook
and Windows Live Mail, for example, store user data here; if this
location isn't backed up, you risk losing all your e-mail messages
and contacts in the event of a disk failure. Countless other programs
from Microsoft and third-party software developers store user data here
as well; one popular example is Mozilla Firefox, which stores user
profiles and settings in a subfolder of AppData.
The
other options under the Additional Locations heading represent the
default folders from your user profile other than those already
included in the standard libraries; Desktop, Downloads, and Favorites
are included in Additional Locations, but not Documents, Music,
Pictures, and Videos, which are part of other libraries. Note that
additional subfolders within your user profile folder (whether created
by you or by a program) are not added to this list and thus will not be
included by default in your backup settings.
The Computer
tree at the bottom of this dialog box exists for those who prefer
old-school backup programs that back up everything in designated
locations. The list includes every local volume on an internal hard
disk (removable drives are not included). You can select an entire
drive or drill into each one to include and exclude specific folders
and subfolders in your backup settings.
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When you're setting up a new general-purpose backup routine, we recommend that you leave the first option, Back Up Data For Newly Created Users, intact. Its purpose is to make sure that your backups
will include libraries and data files for any new user accounts you
create in the future. If you clear this check box, only the data files
and locations you specify when you create your backup settings will be
backed up. So when should you clear this box? If you've set up a
regular backup routine specifically intended to back up only a single
user's data files and some custom locations, you might want to avoid
the prospect of having unwanted locations added to your backup sets
later.
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The final option in the What Do You Want To Back Up dialog box is an option to include a system
image with your backup. You can save a system image automatically with
each backup or use the techniques we describe later in this chapter to
create a system image on demand.
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Every file
on your computer that matches the criteria you select is backed up,
regardless of which user account it belongs to. But not every file is
included in a file backup. Even if you select every box under the Data
Files and Computer headings, Windows excludes some files. For starters,
files stored on any disk formatted with the FAT or FAT32 file system are ignored; drives to be backed up must be formatted with NTFS. System files are excluded,
as are program files and any files in the Recycle Bin. Temporary files
are backed up only on drives that are larger than 1 GB in size.
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2. Creating a System Image Backup
With
a system image backup (previously known as a Complete PC Backup in
Windows Vista), you can rebuild your computer from bare metal in the
event of a catastrophic failure—or if you just want to start fresh. You
don't need to install, update, and activate Windows, reinstall all your
applications, and then configure your applications to work the way you
like; instead, you boot into the Windows Recovery Environment, choose
an image file to restore, and then complete the process by restoring from your latest file backup, which is likely to be more recent than the image. The image files that Windows
Backup creates are largely hardware independent, which means that—with
some limitations—you can restore your backup image to a new computer of
a different brand and type without missing a beat.
As
we noted earlier in this chapter, you can create a system image backup
as part of your regularly scheduled backup routine. However, if your
goal is to quickly create a complete copy of the contents of all drives
that contain Windows system files, you can do so here without having to
mess with backup settings. In the Backup And Restore Control Panel,
click Create A System Image in the left pane and follow the prompts to
select a backup destination. The disk space requirements for an
image-based backup can be substantial. Windows will warn you if the
destination you choose doesn't have sufficient free disk space.
When
you create a system image backup, it stores the complete contents of
all selected drives during its first backup. If the backup target is a
local (internal or external) hard drive, subsequent backup operations
store only new and changed data. Therefore, the subsequent, incremental
backup operation typically runs much faster, depending upon how much
data has been changed or added since the previous image backup
operation. If you choose a shared network folder as the backup
destination (using Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate), you can save
only one image backup. Any subsequent image backup will wipe out the
previous image backup.
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If
you specify a shared network folder as the destination for an image
backup, beware of the consequences if you try to reuse that location
for a subsequent backup of the same computer. If the backup operation
fails for any reason, the older backup will be overwritten, but the
newer backup will not be usable. In other words, you'll have no backup.
You
can avoid this risk by creating a new subfolder in the shared network
folder to hold each new image backup. The disadvantage, of course, is
that each image file will occupy as much space as the original disk,
unlike an incremental image backup on an external hard drive, which
stores only the changed data.
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If you have multiple hard drives, Windows displays a dialog box like the one shown in Figure 4, in which you choose the volumes you want to include in the backup. By default, any volume that contains Windows system files is selected. You can optionally choose to include other drives in the backup image as well.
After you confirm your settings, click Next and then click Start Backup to begin the process of building and saving your image.
System
images are stored in virtual hard drive (.vhd) format. Although the
data is not compressed, it is compact because the image file does not
include the hard drive's unused space and some other unnecessary files,
such as hibernation files, page files, and restore points. Incremental
system image backups
on a local drive are not written to a separate folder. Instead, new and
updated files (actually, the changed blocks in those files) are written
to the same .vhd file. The older blocks are stored as shadow copies in
the .vhd file, allowing you to restore any previous version.
The final step of the image backup process offers to help you create a system
repair disc on a writable CD or DVD. We highly recommend that you take
advantage of this option; if you don't have a blank disc or don't want
to take the minute or so to create the repair disc at this point, you
can do so later using the link in the left pane of the Backup And Restore Control Panel.
3. Restoring Files from a Backup Set
Backing up is pointless if you never need to restore a file. You should be so lucky.
To
restore one or more files, open the Backup And Restore Control Panel.
If the file was backed up from a location within your user profile or
one of your libraries, click Restore My Files. To restore files from
another user's account or to select a different backup, you'll need to
click one of the other links here and supply an administrator's
credentials.
The Restore
Files wizard is unlike other backup/restore programs you might have
used in the past. The list starts out empty. You fill it by searching
and browsing for files and folders to be restored. Using the Search
button allows you to enter all or part of a file or folder name, and
then add one or more items from the search results to your list. To add
individual files, click Browse For Files and make one or more
selections. Click Browse For Folders to select an entire folder and all
its subfolders.
Repeat
the search-browse-select process as many times as needed, adding files
and folders until you've selected everything you want to restore. Figure 5
shows the Browse Or Search Your Backup For Files And Folders To Restore
page of the Restore Files dialog box with a handful of items selected.
Click
Next to specify the location where you want to restore the selected
files. If you're simply recovering an accidentally deleted file, you'll
want to restore it to its original location; if you want to sift
through a group of recovered files before deciding which ones to keep,
restore them to a new folder, as shown here.
4. Restoring a System Image Backup
The
system image capabilities in Windows Backup are intended for creating
an emergency recovery kit for a single PC. In that role, they function
exceptionally well. If your hard drive fails catastrophically, or if
you want to wipe your existing Windows installation and start with a
clean image you created a few weeks or months earlier, you've come to
the right place.
Your
options (and potential gotchas) become more complex if you want to use
these basic image backup and restore tools to work with a complex set
of physical disks and partitions, especially if the disk layout has
changed from the time you created the original image.
In
this chapter, we assume that you have created an image backup of your
system disk and you want to restore it to a system that is essentially
the same (in terms of hardware and disk layout) as the one you started
with. In that case, you can restart your computer using the system
repair disc you created as part of the system image backup (or use the
Windows 7 installation DVD and choose the Repair Your Computer option).
Either route will lead you to the dialog box shown below. Select the
second option to restore your computer using a system image.
Click
Next to select the image backup to restore from. If you're restoring
the most recent image backup to the same system on which it was
originally created and
the backup is stored on an external hard drive attached to the
computer, your job is easy. The latest system image should be available
for your selection. Verify that the date and time and other details of
the image match the one you want to restore and then click Next to
continue.
If the image file you're planning to restore from is on a network
share or if you want to use a different image, choose Select A System
Image and then click Next. You'll see a dialog box that lists
additional image files available on local drives. Select the correct
file, and click Next to select an image created on a specific date if
more than one is available. If the image file you're looking for is on
a shared network folder, click the Advanced button and then enter the
network location and a user name and password that have authorized
access to that account.
Restoring
an image backup completely replaces the current contents of each volume
in the image file. The restore program offers to format the disk or
disks to which it is restoring before it begins the restore process; if
you have multiple drives and/or volumes and you're nervous about wiping
out valuable data files, it offers an option to exclude certain disks
from formatting.
The
important thing to recognize about restoring a system image is that it
will replace the current contents of system volumes with the exact
contents as they existed at the time of the image backup you select.
That means that your Windows system files and registry will be returned
to health (provided the system was in good shape when you performed
your most recent backup and that no hardware-related issues have
cropped up since then). Whatever programs were installed when you
backed up your system will be restored entirely. All other files on the
restored disk, including your documents, will also be returned to their
prior states, and any changes made subsequent to your most recent
backup will be lost.
Warning: If you keep your documents on the same volume as your system files, restoring a system
image is likely to entail the loss of recent work—unless, of course,
you have an up-to-date file backup or you have the good fortune to have
made an image backup almost immediately before your current troubles
began. The same is true if you save documents on a volume separate from
your system files but you have included that data volume in your image
backup. If you have documents that have not been backed up, you can
avoid losing recent work by copying them
to a disk that will not be affected by the restore process—a USB flash
drive, for example, or some other form of I removable media. You can
use the Command Prompt option in the Windows Recovery Environment to
copy these documents.
If you do have a recent file I backup, you will be able to restore
files after you have restored the image backup and I your system is
running again.
Note: The main hardware limitation for restoring a system image backup is that the target computer must have at least as many hard
drives as the source system, and each drive must be at least as big as
its corresponding drive in the source system. This means, for example,
that you can't restore a system image from a system that has a 500-GB
hard drive to a system with a 320-GB hard drive, even if the original
system had less than 100 GB of data on its drive. Keep in mind also
that, on a system with multiple hard drives, the BIOS determines which
one is the bootable drive, and this is the one on which Windows will
restore the image of your system volume. (You have no choice in the
matter, aside from reconnecting the drives or, if your BIOS permits it,
selecting a different bootable drive.)If your new computer meets the
space requirements, restoring a system image should work. This is true
even when the source and target computers use different disk
controllers, such as SCSI, PATA (IDE), or SATA. Similarly, other
differences—such as different graphics cards, audio cards, processors,
and so on—shouldn't prevent you from restoring a system image to a
different computer. This is because hardware drivers are isolated from
the rest of the image information and are rebuilt as part of the
restore process.
5. Managing Saved Backups
The
first time you back up files, Windows performs a complete backup of the
files you specify. Subsequent scheduled backups are incremental
backups, which include only new files and files that have changed. The
incremental backups are stored separately from the original, complete
backup, which means that—in the case of files that change—the backup
set includes each file as it existed at the time of each backup. (A backup set comprises the original backup and all incremental backups.)
A file backup—like a system image backup—relies upon the Volume
Shadow Copy Service to create a volume snapshot when a backup operation
runs. This "point-in-time" image enables the backup program to reliably
back up files that are open or in use and constantly changing, such as
a .pst file for Microsoft Outlook data. The Volume Shadow Copy Service
also keeps track of changes made between shadow copies. For more
information, see "How Volume Shadow Copy Service Works" on the
Microsoft TechNet site at w7io.com/1101.
Backups
are saved to the location you specify in a folder that has the same
name as your computer. That folder contains a subfolder for each backup
set; the set folder contains a subfolder for the original backup and
each subsequent incremental backup, using a naming convention that
includes the date and time when the backup was created. Within the
backup folders, the archived files are saved in ordinary .zip files,
each with a maximum size of 200 MB. This makes the data accessible even
from a computer that's not running Windows 7; simply use the tool of
your choice to browse the content of the .zip files. This storage
method has another benefit: if you back up to removable media such as
CDs and your backup spans several discs, even if one disc is damaged
you can retrieve your data from all undamaged discs, thereby limiting
the amount of lost data.
To see a summary of disk space in use by your current collection of
backups, click Manage Space in the Backup And Restore Control Panel.
The resulting display, like the one shown on the next page, shows how
much disk space is in use on the current backup destination.
To
see a full list of backed-up files by set, click View Backups. This
dialog box allows you to delete a full set of backups from a specific
period, including the initial backup and all incremental changes. Under
the System Image heading, click Change Settings to remove all backed-up
images or save the most recent image and delete all previous ones.
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Your backup folders are "empty"
If
you use Windows Explorer to browse to your backup folders, when you
rest the mouse pointer over a folder name, the pop-up tip might
identify it as an "Empty folder." Alarmed, you right-click the folder
and choose Properties, only to find that the folder apparently contains
0 bytes, 0 files, and 0 folders. Don't worry. This is the normal
condition when your backups are stored on an NTFS volume, because by
default, only the System user account has permission to view the files.
(That's a reasonable security and reliability precaution, which
prevents you or another user from inadvertently deleting a key backup
file.) If you're confident of your ability to work safely with backup
files in their native format, the solution is simple: Double-click the
folder name. Follow the prompts, including a User Account Control (UAC)
consent dialog box, to permanently add your user account to the
folder's permissions list, giving you Full Control access to the folder.
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