Jan 23
Windows Complete Backup
Many of us mobile users would like to find an easy way to backup our laptops while not being on the network. Well Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, ships with the Windows Backup and Restore center with “Windows Complete PC Backup”. Complete PC Backup creates a block level image backup of the entire computer in a Microsoft Virtual Hard Drive (.vhd) file. It can only be backed up to a removable disk or burned to one or more DVD’s, so you can’t back it up to a partition on your existing hard disk.
When you backup the computer for the first time a block level backup is performed and all the blocks are then copied to the .vhd file. The disks are compacted, but not compressed in a .zip file. For example, I have a 25 GB system drive and the .vhd is only 12 GB.
The next time a “Complete PC Backup” is performed, only new and changed data is written to the .vhd file. Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is used to compute the differences between snapshots and to handle the process of moving the old data out to the shadow copy area on the new backup file. See the image below for details.
One drawback to this process is that you can’t go in and restore individual files, just the entire disk image. In the Backup and Restore Center there is an option to do a file backup that will backup individual files, but you can’t select individual files and folders. Windows scans your PC for various types of non-system files and backs them up for you; however, everything will get backed up.
So you can run the Complete PC Backup once a week to prevent against total disk failures and run a file backup once a week to prevent against accidental deletions of individual files. For more detailed information on this backup process, read this article on TechNet. For a detailed tutorial on how to run a Complete PC Backup, you can view this article as well.