What Happened To ... The Backup Utility?

My original coverage of Vista's backup utility was just a walk-through of its features, but as time has gone on it's become clear to me that many of the people who used the original NTBACKUP utility (or a third-party backup application) are really not happy with the new Vista backup tool.  They find it too simple (shilling for simpleminded), and want to have more control over exactly what gets backed up and where to.  In this episode of "What Happened To...?" I'll address these problems and suggest some workarounds.

1. What's the Vista Backup Utility and What's the Problem with It?

In an earlier article (linked above), I wrote about the Windows Vista Backup Utility, which is designed to back up documents and data to an external device (a hard drive, CD-ROM or network location), either on demand or on a schedule.

The single biggest problem that most people have with Vista Backup is the lack of flexibility in terms of what is backed up and from where.  In the original NTBACKUP tool, you could choose exactly what files and directories were backed up, and where to back them up to:

In Vista Backup, you can only choose one or more drives to back up from, and what TYPES of files from each you want to back up:

This creates some serious problems, since it's now very difficult if not outright impossible to include some specific file types and exclude others.  For instance, the "Compressed files" option includes .ZIP and .CAB files -- which I do want to back up -- but also includes .VHD (Virtual PC's Virtual Hard Disk format) files, which I don't want to bother with.  There's no way to include one but exclude the other, so I'm stuck backing up both of them unless I move the .VHD files to another drive (which I really don't want to have to do!).

So the biggest problem with the Vista backup tool is its relative inflexibility.  It's been made much easier to use, but at the cost of being that much harder to manage.

2. How Do I Even Know What's Been Backed Up?

Another complaint I've heard about the new backup tools is that it's too hard to tell if a given file has been backed up, as there doesn't seem to be a central manifest of backed-up files.

The best way to find out if a given file has been backed up is to right-click on the file, select Properties | Previous Versions, and wait for the File Versions list to populate.  There's no visual feedback that indicates if the list is still populating itself, so you may need to sit tight for a bit before everything appears.

 The "Location" column will tell you where previous versions of the file reside.  If you see a "Backup" entry for the last backup date (which is visible in the main window of the Backup and Restore Center, then that file's been backed up.  (If the "Location" column reads "Shadow copy" for a particular revision, that means that revision is stored in that volume's shadow copy repository.)

3. What's To Be Done?

There's a few things you can do in lieu of using the regular backup utility.

1. Use NTBACKUP once more

After Vista was released to the public, Daniel Petri did some research and found a way to get NTBACKUP running in Windows Vista.  It involves obtaining a copy of NTBACKUP and some support files from an existing copy of Windows XP, and then activating the Storage Manager service in Vista (which is not normally running by default).  If you're familiar with NTBACKUP, or already have backup files in the NTBACKUP format, you can use it more or less as you did in XP and Windows 2000.  You should not use it to make or restore System State backups, though, and (as with many legacy apps) NTBACKUP runs best in admin mode.

Many people also complained that people couldn't restore backups made with the classic NTBACKUP program.  To that end, Microsoft decided to release a free download for all those who had a licensed copy of Windows, which allows you to restore NTBACKUP repositories in Vista without needing NTBACKUP itself.

One major disadvantage of using NTBACKUP is that the files generated by NTBACKUP cannot be restored by the Vista recovery disk; you have to restore them by using NTBACKUP itself or with the above utility.  Also, you can't perform full system backup and restore with it as per the Vista backup utility.  Finally, NTBACKUP requires the Storage Manager service to be installed and enabled (there are instructions on how to do this within the download).

2. Use a third-party Vista-aware backup program.

If you don't want to use NTBACKUP, you can always turn to a third-party backup solution, as long as it's specifically marked as being Vista compatible.  Unless the app is Vista-aware, there will be a marked lack of integration with Vista (no backup notification, etc.), and backup sets may not be generated or restored correctly.

3. Change your storage habits

This is the least appealing option, and the most cumbersome.  If you have more than one drive, you can move everything that you don't want to have covered by the backup utility to another drive, and let Vista's backup automatically handle what's in your Users folder.  Again, though, this is probably not going to sit well with people unless they had planned on breaking down and remodeling their work habits in the first place.