I started the article a few months ago and never got around to finishing it because after testing it for myself I found it hard to believe that this is how it was suppose to work and kind of waited around for possibly more information or maybe a pointer to a hidden checkbox or something. Now that Windows 7 has stuck its adorable little head out this gives me a good opportunity to contrast XP, Vista, Win7.

A Walk though of back to removable media device (DVD) using vista backup:

To see what we are looking at, here are my partition and drive layouts	So lets first go into Vista's backup program by opening Backup Status and Configuration	Let's now look at Computer Backup	Vista will look for devices that it can use for backup
Here you can select the device that Vista will use to back up your system on	Now we can choose what "devices" aka drives we want to backup. Note that the system disk is not excludable.	A little confirmation	and then start feeding the machine DVDs

I will admit that I was very intrigued at Vista being able to use DVD-R or CDR as a backup device. This is a first for Microsoft. I haven't seen an official reason as to why or why not Microsoft did not allow this in XP but I suspect that the media was considered too unreliable from device to device and media to media. This has been my experience anyway in doing backups of files and folders manually. At any rate, it looks like Microsoft has felt they worked out what ever it was that needed to be worked out so coolness.  But is it a solution? Here’s the short of it for me, 25 DVDs to back up my hd, feeding one disk after the other through each write at 3x burn is not a solution. Also to point out that each DVD is approximately 4.7 gigs of space and I was only backing up approximately 36 gigs of information, doesn’t quite add me thinks.  Perhaps with a new Blue Ray DVD burner we may have something but still I would have to go with a bigger network drive as a more economical solution. So on to that then.

Scheduling auto backup, a few more screen shots…
 

Selecting auto back up for local or network storage	local	Network	You can choose which disks to back up, can’t exclude the system disk
Choosing what file type to backup? A bit odd, and why not let me chose exactly what files to back up		Setting the schedule for auto-back up

Here both Vista and Server 2008 fail in a major way for this geek. Under both XP and Server 2003 you could select exactly what it was you wanted backed up. More importantly you could exclude what you did not want backed up. Imagine, for instance, a user on the machine had all of her CDs ripped to the hard drive. This takes up a lot of space and if the system gets trashed they can be re-ripped; no need to back up then. Now you may argue, “just uncheck the music check box and no problem its not backed up”. Great but what if she had music that DID need to be back up, recordings of the local band, audio log recordings, or whatever? Hey guess what is not there when you go to restore that hard drive.

Here Vista fails in a big way. In an effort of, I can only presume, to make it simpler and more “fool proof” they created a product, that is in my opinion; inferior to what they already had. It’s worth noting here, to be fair, that Vista and XP backup files operate in a different manor. Vista uses Microsoft’s new VHD technology. As it turn’s out however, this is not so important from a user’s standpoint with an out of the box install of Vista (SP1), but radically cool if you are into Virtual PCs and Microsoft is way into virtual PCs. But with Windows 7 this becomes a very cool new trick for your computer. So on to Win7 backup and a post on Windows Home Server I hope to have up soon. …