In my last post I laid out how Vista backed up your files and commented on one of the fundamental short comings of Windows Vista Backup solution, primarily that you can only back up entire drives. I also mentioned that Vista introduced new technology as a backup solution over XP which implements Microsoft's Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) technology. In this post I will walk through some of the fixes over the short comings of Vista backup and in my next post I’ll show some interesting ways you can use this technology above the means of simple backup and restore solutions.

First the good news, Windows 7 has introduced a new solution for backing up selective file from the computer as opposed to a complete drive image. However Vista’s VHD full drive image remains available. And for the new trick in Windows 7, the OS can now attach the VHDs as usable virtual drives on the system.

So lets take a quick look at the new selective file back up in Windows 7:

We select where we want to save our backup.	we can choose a network location as our destination	Let Windows decide what to back up or select our own	Choose specifically what to backup	Do it.

Some interesting things about selective backup:
Windows does not use VHD for this method. If you where to explore the location where the back up is stored you will find a catalog file (.wbcat)  that describe the back up, a bin file used by the system to auto-restore from this location, and some zip files that contain the actual data that was backed up. Yes zip file; this I think is a significant coming to grips with reality moment for Microsoft, or perhaps it was jut the easy route, and to understand why you would have to appreciate a little history about MS and their backup solutions.

Basically Microsoft has had a poor track record of out of the box compatibility for restoring files from one OS version to another. For example if you were to come across a stack of floppy disks backup that was created with Windows 3.11 way back when and for some reason wanted to get files out of it you’d likely end up spending a whole lot of time digging through information on the internet for a solution or installing Windows 3.11 on some ad hoc machine for the restore. Thankfully I have never had the need to do this but I could be tempted should I happen to stumble across a stack of floppies, ar… maybe there’s lost treasure in them bits. The scenario is basically true for any their legacy OSs to its predecessors. There are tools out there from Microsoft and others that resolves some issue; here for example you will find Microsoft's’ tool for restoring XP backup files to Vista, but again this is leg work on your part. In contrast, the fact that the files are now backed up as zip means that any OS can view and restore these files should they need to.

Browsing to the location of the the selective backup	1 folder in	2 folders in	Looking at our Zip file	inside the Zip file

*Note, my testing of the backup in Windows 7 revealed several zip files that had complete files in each and could be restored via the zip itself. It maybe wishful thinking on my part that this is the way it works for very large data sets or the way it works in the future. Microsoft could for instance breakup a very large file into several zips which would prove difficult to “piece” back together without out some extensive knowledge and use of the wbcat file to reverse the method used to split the file during backup to a particular media.

Ok, easy enough, a quick look then at the Full Drive Image Backup:

Select the destination of where the backup is to be stored; local drive, series of DVDs, or a network location	Choose the drive to be imaged. Note that you must choose the system drive, but can also choose additional drives.	Confirm and start backup.

Nothing new here, this is the same as the only options for Vista backup. I’m very disappointed that you can not turn off the system drive back up as an option and only back up the drive of your choice. But hey, with the combination of the selective backup and what I’m about to talk about (VHD mounting) it’s less of a real issue and I actually just used this to install Windows 7 on my five year old Averatech c3500 Tablet PC which I will talk about in my next post.