Scope

As a consequence of it having been inexplicably omitted from the default installation of Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Backup is a sadly underused utility, that has the functionality and ease-of-use to play an important role in personal data protection.

It may be used to:

• Archive selected files and folders on your hard disk.
• Restore the archived files and folders to a hard disk drive or removable storage device, such as recordable or rewritable CD or DVD media.
• Use Automated System Recovery to save and restore all the system files and configuration settings needed to recover from a complete system failure.
• Make a copy of your computer's System State, which includes the system files, the registry, Component Services, the Active Directory database, and the Certificate Services database.
• Make a copy of your computer's system partition, boot partition, and the files needed to start up your system in case of computer or network failure.
• Schedule regular backups to keep your archived data up-to-date.

This tutorial will take you through the steps involved in manually installing the Backup utility from a Windows XP Home Edition CD-ROM and using it to backup and subsequently restore your data.