XP: Backup Your Important Files for Safety X 380 / 1 Protect Your Personal Files Against Accidental Loss with XP s Backup Wizard Your computer contains a great many important files, but when it comes to the crunch, the ones that really matter are those you create yourself: the documents you ve written, the pictures you ve taken, and so on. Everything else your programs and Windows itself can be fixed or reinstalled, but your own files are unique and irreplaceable. In this article, I ll introduce you to XP s handy built-in program that can backup all the files you value, and if the worst should happen easily replace the files you would otherwise have lost. By Don Levison How Windows XP Makes It Easy to Backup Your Files... Choosing Where to Store Your Backups... Use the Backup Wizard to Backup Your Important Files... Disaster? How To Use Your Backup to Restore Lost Files... This article shows you how to:... Install Windows Backup if you use XP Home Edition... Backup your personal files in a few easy steps... Recover lost files quickly from your backup copies Windows XP X 380 / 2 X 380 / 3 X 380 / 5 X 380 / 11 67
X 380 / 2 Your files can be lost in lots of ways Make regular backups to protect against accidents Windows Backup does this in a few steps How Windows XP Makes It Easy to Backup Your Files There are all sorts of ways in which your personal files could be lost, ranging from a complete failure of your hard disk, theft of your PC or an invasion of malicious software through to a simple accident (deleting a file or folder by mistake). Losing personal files is the worst thing that can happen to a computer user, because they are the one aspect of your system that can never be replaced. This is why it s important to make backups (safety copies) of all your personal files, and to keep those backups up-to-date. If something does go wrong and you discover that some of your personal files are gone, you can simply reach for the disk containing your backups and put back what you ve lost. How do you make your backups? The simplest way is to use a program named Windows Backup that is supplied with Windows XP, and I ll lead you through the process in steps a little later in this article. Let s start with a quick thumbnail description so that you ll know what to expect: When you start the Backup program, you ll be able to choose what to backup. There s a straightforward setting that copies all your personal files (as long as you keep them all somewhere inside the My Documents folder), but you can include other folders too if you keep files elsewhere. The first backup you create will be a Normal backup, which contains a copy of all the files you chose to copy. 68
X 380 / 3 At regular intervals, you ll run the Backup program again and tell it to copy any new files you ve created, or files you ve edited, since the last backup. What are those regular intervals? In general I would recommend that you backup your files about once a week. However, there s no hardand-fast rule about this. If a week goes by when you haven t created or edited anything much, you might decide your current backup doesn t really need updating. Conversely, if you have a flurry of activity and create or edit a number of files in a day or two, you might want to get these files backed up sooner. It s a matter of balancing the time and trouble needed to backup your files against what you stand to lose if you don t do it and some sort of disaster occurs. Choosing Where to Store Your Backups One of the first things you ll be asked in Windows Backup is where you want to store your backups. You ll need a disk that has quite a lot of storage space, because although Windows Backup compresses all your files into a single file, that single file will quite likely be several hundred megabytes in size (and might be over a gigabyte ). We can rule out a few types of disk straight away. A floppy disk won t come close to holding all this data; Windows Backup won t work with CDs, and a CD could well be too small anyway; your hard disk has space, but that s not a very sensible place to store backups because if your hard disk fails or your PC is stolen, you ll lose your originals and your backups at the same time. Be sure to update your backup regularly! Your backup could be very large You can t store it on a floppy disk or CD 69
X 380 / 4 A USB flash drive is the best choice XP Home users need to download Windows Backup My strong recommendation is to use a flash drive. These little devices plug into a USB socket on your computer when you need to use them, and can be unplugged again when you ve finished creating your backups. You can buy a 2 GB flash drive (which is the size I d suggest) for around 15 in any computer shop and even in some supermarkets. Windows XP Home Users: You Have to Install Windows Backup First If you use XP Professional edition, you can skip ahead to the next heading. However, if you use XP Home edition, we need to deal with a small problem before you can continue. For some reason, Microsoft chose not to install the Backup program in Windows XP Home! They did include a copy on the Windows XP installation CD, but if you didn t receive a Windows XP installation CD when you bought your computer (which you probably didn t), that s not much help. Fortunately you can also download the program from the Internet, so follow these steps to do that: 1. Start Internet Explorer, type the address below into its address bar and press Enter: http://tinyurl.com/2ownqf 2. When you arrive at the website, scroll down a little way and you ll see a section like the one pictured in the following screenshot. Click the link that says Windows XP Backup. 70
X 380 / 5 Click this link to download the software 3. Now you ll see a small dialog asking whether you want to Run or Save the file. Click the Run button. 4. It s a fairly small file which will download in just a minute or so. As soon as it has finished downloading, the Windows Backup program will start to install automatically (because you chose the Run option in step 3) which is just what you want. You may see another dialog giving a choice between Run and Don t Run buttons; if so, choose Run. 5. The installation itself only takes a few seconds. When it s complete, click the Finish button, close Internet Explorer, and you re ready to backup your files. Use the Backup Wizard to Backup Your Important Files Now you re ready to backup your files. Whether this is the first time you ve used Windows Backup to create a backup, or you want to do your weekly update to backup any new and edited files, the steps are almost identical; I ll point out the one small difference along the way. 71
X 380 / 6 1. Connect your flash drive to your PC. Windows may open a window displaying the contents of the drive; if so, just close that window as we don t need it. 2. Now start the Windows Backup program by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup. 3. After a few seconds you ll see a friendly window welcoming you to the Backup or Restore Wizard. A wizard is a type of program that you follow in steps by clicking the buttons at the bottom. Click the Next button to move past this welcoming step. 4. Now we re at the first real step of the process, pictured in the next screenshot. Make sure the option labelled Back up files and settings is selected and click Next. Select this option Click Next Choose what to backup 5. In this step you choose which files you want to backup. For our purposes, there are three options to choose between: My documents and settings: if you keep all your own files inside the My Documents folder, choose this option, click Next, and jump to step 7. 72
X 380 / 7 Everyone s documents and settings: if other people log on to your computer using their own name, and you also want to backup their files, choose this option, click Next, and jump to step 7. Let me choose what to backup: if you store some (or all) of your personal files in other folders, outside the My Documents folder, choose this option, which allows you to pick the folders containing your own files, then click Next and continue to step 6. Don t choose the option labelled All information on this computer. That will backup every single file on your computer, which takes a very long time and probably wouldn t fit on your flash drive. Also, as I mentioned earlier, you really don t need backups of all those system-related files. 6. If you selected the option Let me choose what to back up, you ll now see the window pictured in the next screenshot. In the lefthand side of this window you can tick boxes beside the folders you want to backup (which places little blue ticks in them). For example, tick the box beside My Documents if you want the files in that folder to be backed up. To locate other folders, click the + sign beside My Computer to see your hard disk (C:), then click the + sign beside your hard disk to see all the folders it contains. You can then tick the boxes beside any folders containing your personal files to include them in the backup. (If you tick the wrong folder accidentally, just click it again to remove the tick.) When you ve ticked off the folders containing your personal files, click Next to move to the next step. Select folders by ticking their boxes 73
X 380 / 8 Click the boxes to tick any folders you want to backup Click Next Try to keep your selection as simple as possible, ignoring the right-hand side of the window. Rather than picking and choosing between individual files, which the right-hand list allows you to do, tick the folders containing your important files. This is because you ll need to tick off the same items each time you update your backup, and keeping it simple will make it easier to remember which folders to tick each time. 7. Now you ve reached the step pictured in the next screenshot. Open the drop-down list indicated in the screenshot and choose your flash drive (which will probably be referred to as Removable Disk ) to tell the program that this is where your backups should be stored. In the box below, the program asks you to choose a name for your backup, and suggests naming it Backup. The name doesn t really matter, except that the name you choose now must be used every time you want to update your backup in future. For simplicity, I recommend leaving the name Backup unchanged. Click Next. 74
X 380 / 9 Open this list and select your flash drive The name Backup is fine Click Next 8. In the next step you ll see a button marked Finish, but ignore it! We haven t quite finished yet. Click the Advanced button instead. 9. This step is very simple, as you can see from the next screenshot, but it s also very important: If this is your very first backup, choose Normal from the drop-down list. This will make sure all your backup contains all your personal files. If you ve already made your very first backup, and you re now using the program to update it, open the drop-down list and choose Differential. This tells Windows to examine your personal files and find out which have been added or edited since your last backup. It will then add these to your backup, which should be a much quicker job than your original Normal backup. If you choose Normal for your second or subsequent backups, one of two things will happen. Either your backup copy will get very large very quickly, because Windows will add identical copies of files that haven t changed, or Windows will delete your old backup and create a new one. That second possibility doesn t Choose the correct type of backup! 75
X 380 / 10 sound too bad, but it is: imagine you ve accidentally deleted some personal files but haven t yet realised they re gone: if Windows deletes your old backup and creates a brand new one, that new one won t contain those missing files, so they re gone for good! This is why it s important to choose Differential to keep your existing backup up-to-date. 10. After choosing Normal or Differential as appropriate, click Next. This step asks you to choose other options, and we don t want any of those. Make sure no boxes are ticked in that step and click Next again. 11. In the next step, make sure the option labelled Append this backup to the existing backups is selected and click Next. The job may take a few minutes 12. Now you re asked when you want to run the backup. Make sure the Now option is selected and click Next. 13. Now you ll see a page summarising the options you ve chosen. Click Finish. 14. The wizard window will close and another window will appear which shows you how the backup is progressing. How long it takes will depend on how many files are to be backed up in total it may be a few minutes, so it s a good time to make a cuppa! When the job is done, you ll see another slightly-smaller window with the words The backup is complete near the top. Click the Close button in this dialog and you re done. 15. You can now unplug your flash drive from your PC and put it somewhere safe until the next time you want to update your backups. 76
X 380 / 11 If you were to have a look at what your flash drive contains, you d find just one file named Backup (unless you chose a different name in step 7). Don t worry, this is as it should be. All the files you backed up have been compressed into this single file to save space. Disaster? How To Use Your Backup to Restore Lost Files If something goes wrong that causes you to lose one or more of your valued files, you won t be in any mood for complicated procedures. Fortunately, the Windows Backup Wizard makes the process of recovering your lost files from a backup fairly painless. When you need to restore lost files, just follow these steps: 1. Plug the flash drive containing your backup into your PC. (As before, if a window opens displaying the contents of the drive, just close it.) 2. Start the Windows Backup program by choosing Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup. 3. Step past the welcoming page of the wizard by clicking Next to reach the step pictured in the next screenshot. Click the option labelled Restore files and settings and then click Next. Recover lost files in a few steps Choose the option to restore files and settings Click Next 77
X 380 / 12 4. Now you ll see the window pictured in the next screenshot. At the left of this window is a list of the backups you ve created. (You should only see one backup listed here, but if you do see two or more, have a look at the date shown alongside each and pick the most recent.) Click the + sign beside your backup and you ll see an item named C: (referring to your hard disk). Click the box beside C: to tick 5. The simplest way of working is to tick the box beside that C: item. That tells Windows to compare all the files in your backup with the files on your hard disk and see which ones are missing from your hard disk. It will then replace any files that have vanished from your hard disk, but won t make any changes to the files that are still there. That makes this a neat and safe option. This time you can ignore the Advanced button 78 If you re worried about this option, or there are only a few files you want to recover and you want to do it as fast as possible, you can click the + sign beside C:, then click + signs beside the folders it contains and look through the folders and files in your backup to find and tick only the ones you want. 6. Click the Next button, and you ll reach a step that shows both a Finish button and an Advanced
X 380 / 13 button. If you click the Advanced button you ll step through a few other options before finishing, and I ll explain those options below. However, when restoring files, you probably want the result I mentioned a moment ago: to restore any files that have vanished entirely from your hard disk and to do nothing else, and if so you can click the Finish button. The rest happens automatically: a separate window will keep you posted on the progress of restoring your files, and then a smaller window will tell you that the restore is complete. The box below the word Processed will tell you how many files were restored. Click Close in that window. This box tells you how many files were copied back to your hard disk Using the Advanced options when restoring files As I mentioned in step 6 above, you can click an Advanced button and choose extra options about how and where your files are restored. This button leads to three more steps containing options I ll explain briefly: 79
X 380 / 14 You can restore your files into a new, empty folder Choose whether existing files should be replaced with backup copies These three boxes can be ignored The first step lets you choose where to put the files being copied from your backup to your hard disk. The usual choice is Original location, which puts the files in the folder where the originals were stored (before they went missing). If you prefer, you can choose Alternate location: you can then click a Browse button that appears below and select a different folder where the new files should be placed. (If you plan to use this option, it s best to create a new, empty folder before starting the Backup Wizard, and select this empty folder when you reach this step.) The second step allows you to choose whether or not your backup copies should replace any existing files. The normal setting is Leave existing files (recommended). You can also choose to replace existing files if your backup copies are newer, or to always replace your existing files with your backup copies. Treat this option with great care, because you could potentially replace a recently-edited file with an old copy and thus lose your recent changes! I strongly suggest using the recommended option, Leave existing files. However, if you chose Alternate location in the previous step and created a new folder for the restored files, it s safe to choose one of the other options: as they will all be put into a folder that s currently empty, there s no chance of any existing files being replaced by your backup copies. The third step provides three checkboxes which all relate to rather technical, expert options. Normally, all three boxes should be ticked, but they actually won t affect your restored files in any way that matters. 80