CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.4. Understanding Backup and Restore

Ensuring data recoverability involves performing a backup (normally to another type of medium) in addition to storing the file on the hard drive. This medium could be (for example) a floppy disk, another hard drive, a tape drive, a Zip drive, or CD-ROM.

If you have lost a single file (or all the files) on your hard drive, you will want to perform a restore. You need to have your backup files or tapes available and use the Windows XP backup utility to restore your files.

3.4.1. Backing up your computer

The Windows 2000 and Windows XP backup software is greatly improved over Windows NT 4.0 backup software, and Windows Vista has improved this process even more. Windows 2000 and Windows XP backup software picks up where its predecessor left off, allowing you to schedule regular automatic backups and to back up to nearly any medium you like (including, but not limited to, tape drives). Even though the tool is new, Microsoft has kept the name of ntbackup.exe, and supports all the old command line switches for backward compatibility.

The backup utility allows you to create a backup of all local files on your disk drives, as well as the system state. Open files, such as the Registry and system databases, cannot normally be backed up on your computer, but system state allows you to back up these files by using new file locking methods.

Each organization decides how often it needs to back up each of its computers. This decision is often based on the ...