Complete PC Backup experiences

[wpwood3]

I'm a big fan of making and keeping backups. Anyone who has experienced the loss of a hard drive will quickly gain backup religion. That's why I was eager to test Vista's Complete PC Backup function.

I just wiped the hard drive on my T60 and installed Vista and activated it. What a perfect time to do a total system backup just in case I need to revert back to a "clean install" state.

First I backed up to an external USB drive. The entire backup took up a little under 8 GB.

Next I decided to try backing up to DVD to see how that worked. Since my previous backup was nearly 8 GB I decided to use a Dual Layer DVD so I could get the entire backup on one disc. To my surprise the backup on DVD was barely over 4 GB! I could have used a single layer DVD.

As we all know, backups are useless if they can't be restored. I decided to wipe my drive again and try restoring from the 4 GB image on the DVD just to see if it was corrupt or not. I rebooted my T60 using the Vista install DVD and selected the option to do a Complete PC Restore. The Vista DVD was removed and the 4 GB backup DVD was inserted. After the restore process completed I rebooted the T60 and to my surprise Vista came up and everything worked perfectly.

I did some research and found out that Complete PC Backup can only write data to NTFS formatted drives or DVD's. When it writes to DVD the data is compressed. When it writes to NTFS drives it does NO data compression because it utilizes a function called "Volume ShadowCopy Service" or "VSS". VSS allows Complete PC Backup to perform incremental backups. Evidently, data compression would cause the the backup file to change significantly from version to version so it is turned off automatically when backing up to NTFS drives.

It would be nice to be able to manually turn on data compression if you wanted to but I haven't found a way so far. Regardless, Complete PC Backup seems to work quite well.

[Kyocera]

That's cool to know bill, I have been poking around in with the backup functions but have not used them yet, thanks for the insight! What brand of DVD's did you use?

[wpwood3]

What brand of DVD's did you use?

I used a Verbatim DL DVD.

As a further point...
After posting this thread I loaded my nearly 1.5GB Outlook pst file from my desktop onto my T60 along with some needed data and applications. I hooked up the external USB harddrive and did another Complete PC backup. It was FAST! Evidently, Vista determined what the changed and new files were and simply did an incremental backup. Vista must have opened the original backup file on the USB drive and just added the changes.

Not bad!