How to back up Vista with recovery disk(preinstalled)

Hi All,

Thanks for reading for this post.

I just bought a new Dell Studio and it came with Vista Home premium 64 bit preinstalled in it. It also has a recovery disk option which I presume restores the OS back to factory settings.

The question(s) I needed your help are:

1. How should I back up my OS i.e. with or without recovery disk?
2. How to back up just user account settings (individual user) so that even if OS crashes I can recover it using recovery disk and then Acronis can restore the user account?
3. Which back up method will be most beneficial i.e. incremental or diffrential or complete back up of drives?
4. And one last one, what about windows backup thing that came preinstalled in Vista. Is it worth using?

Thanks to everyone for their help in advance.

 

The simplest way to back up is to run ATI and selct to backup My Computer and select the entire harddisk (all partitions) and backup them up to an external harddisk. When you restore, you get everything bck the way it was when you started the backup.

You will need a "recovery" CD if your hardisk ever has a hardware failure. So make one ofthose first; make a backup and then test the restore funciton by booting the bootCD and going thorugh the steps of restore right up to but not including the final proceed. This makes sure the boot cd can see all of your hardware/drives. You can't backup up individual Users although you can back up individual partitions. You can manually select files to backup, but it starts to get complicated then as determining which files are needed for which program can be hard to do,, not to mention that Registry settings are dynamic. Unless you really know what you are doing, I think you should stick with entire disk/p[artition backups -- at least until you've read an understand the user guide. You'll be asking for less confusion and fewer headaches that way.

check out the user guide--lots of good info there.

You'llhave to try Windows Vista Backup to see if it lights your light for you or not. As will almost all "built-in" free utilities in Windows, they are stripped down bare bones utilities, but that might be all you want.

 

Thanks Shieber for your reply t
I have been using Acronis TI since version 10 , but so far this was on XP only . Being new to vista , I didn’t wanted to take any chances ….

Now pc that I want to backup has an WD 500 GB HD with 348GB data (including vista).
So backing up the whole disk will be too much for me …..
That was the main reason I want to backup only user settings and data as I can recover vista from factory restore thing.

What will be best backup strategy in this scenario?

Again, Thanks for your help

 

Hello jatti,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

Unfortunately using Acronis True Image Home 2009 you can’t backup user profile separately. But you can copy user profile manually from Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Click Settings button under the User Profiles section -> Click the profile you want to copy.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev