Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Backup

When your hard drive fails, a virus attacks, or another disaster befalls you, you can lose everything—your bank records, your work files, even your saved Quake games. To protect yourself and your data, you must back up (make safety copies of) your data regularly.

If you're on a typical corporate network, you won't have to worry much about backing up; a highly paid network administrator has probably set up a network-wide backup system that works automatically. But if you've created a peer-to-peer network, or if you're using Windows 2000 Pro on a stand-alone computer, you can use Windows 2000 Pro's Backup program precisely for this purpose.

Microsoft licensed this powerful backup program from Veritas Software. It lets you back up entire disk drives or selected files and folders, at times and under the conditions you specify.

It's a simple matter to use the wizards included with Backup to perform basic backups (known as backup jobs), as shown in Figure 18-1. But a bit of planning is in order if you want to create a reliable and efficient backup strategy. This chapter guides you through using Backup and devising a backup strategy.

Figure 18-1. When you launch Windows 2000 Pro's Backup program, the Welcome screen's buttons let you launch the Backup and Restore Wizards, as well as create an Emergency Repair Disk (ERD). An ERD contains a file called Setup.log that specifies ...