Whether you???re a business or individual it???s more important than ever to be able to recover from it as quickly as possible and with minimum data loss.?? Understanding this Microsoft Vista Ultimate and Business editions are now bundled with a good and easy to use Backup and Restore service.?? However it???s surprising just how many people no so little about it and are not using it.?? This article outlines this useful service and how to get the best out of it so you can feel secure in the knowledge recovering from a disaster is simplicity itself.

A pre-requisite to using this feature of Vista is buying the license for either Vista Business or Ultimate editions.?? Unfortunately Microsoft have not made it available in other versions of Vista.???? There are two types of backup you can use, and they affect how you restore the system :

1. Using the ???Backup Computer??? it???s possible to write what???s called an image backup of your entire PC to a backup device usually a USB stick or external drive.?? This snapshot of your entire system allows you to recover exactly to the same point in time.?? However, because it is an ???image??? of your system drive it requires the restoring PC to have a system drive of at least the same capacity.?? Usually it would be the same PC so this is not a problem.?? It is also the lengthier of the two backup options as it backs up the whole machine.

2. Using ???Backup Files??? you can backup selected data files such as images, photos, music, documents, spreadsheets, emails and application data.?? This type of backup is incremental i.e. it only backs up changed files and therefore is usually very fast taking only a few minutes.?? However it will not enable you to restore a full system, only those backed up files.

Typically we advise you use both types of backup and blend them to cover all your data and system.?? So for example you might take a complete backup weekly, but a file backup daily.?? In the event of a disaster you would need to restore the system backup first, and then each daily backup (since its incremental) that contains changes that will not be on the full system backup.

The service has a scheduling function within it so that regular file or full image backups can be taken on a regular basis be that daily, weekly or monthly, whatever suits your needs.?? With the speed of modern drives the backup of your entire PC can be done within an hour and in the event of a disaster be recovered in a similar amount of time.

There are many options for backup devices but with the steadily decreasing cost of external hard drives and USB memory sticks these are looking like the consumer and very small business users backup device of choice.?? You need a minimum of 80GB of space to backup up your entire system and that???s what I???d recommend you do. An external hard drive would normally be connected to your PC via a free USB2 socket, however in some instances you may also have eSATA, Ethernet or Firewire (IEEE1394) connections available as alternatives. The fastest connections to use for backup in reverse order are USB2, Firewire and eSATA.

Should your machine stop working for either software or hardware related reasons the Image backup allows you to return it to its last working state to and be confident that everything should work perfectly as it did previously. What this means is that should anything go wrong with your current installation like a faulty hard drive, corrupt windows file or Virus problems, all that is needed to be done is to enter the Windows Vista Ultimate or Business disc, plug in the backup device and start the PC. Once you have done so, follow the steps below to fully restore your PC to the exact state as it was at the last backup.

Keeping your back-up image up to date means you don???t have to worry about any problems caused by software errors, virus infections, hardware failures or corruption. Similarly, should your system hard disk fail entirely, all that would need to be done would be to get a replacement, install it and then follow the process of a system restore and you would have your operating system and software back as it was before.

Please note system restore points described in Windows are a different tool. They save operating system files as a snapshot at a given time in another directory (usually hidden) on your system disk so that without referring to a backup you can reverse a hot fix, service pack or driver update should it prove to cause instability or bugs.?? This is obviously no use to you is the system disk fails or becomes corrupted.

How to restore Vista from a backup

Assuming you have your backups now to recover from your backup device (USB or External hard drive), and your machine is now back up and running (or you are using a similar replacement machine) and you have the same capacity hard drive space available it???s very simple.?? Just go through the following steps:

1. Insert your Windows operating system DVD into the drive

2. Reboot your machine (or power on)

3. If you are asked whether to ‘Press A Key’ to boot from CD-ROM, then do so. The standard windows installation process will now begin with a progress bar along the bottom of your screen. Select your preferred language when prompted (i.e. ‘UK English’) and click ???Next???.

4. Once the Windows setup DVD has started select the Repair option from the first screen. You will see the ???Repair your computer??? option on the bottom left. Click on it and click ???Select???.
On The following screen click ???Next??? and you will get to a screen with an option o perform a ???Complete PC restore???

5. Then select the option to ‘Windows Complete Restore’ to restore from your latest backup (ensure your backup device is already connected and switched on)

6. Windows will now look for backups on your device and allow you to restore your system from it, this will take a few minutes depending on how big your system disk was in terms of volume of data that has been backed up

7. Now remove the Windows setup DVD, and reboot your PC again

8. Your system will now be restored to the state of your last Full image backup

9. You can now go into Control Panel, System Maintenance, Backup and Restore, and select to restore any documents, images, music, email or data files that are backed up individually but were not in the last Full image backup

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