Is Vista Complete Backup any good?

[Zak33]

Lo people

Didn't even KNOW that Vista had a back up facility, so I'm running one now, for my boot drive.

But does it work? Can I replicate it to another hard drive if this one dies, for example? And what software is it using?

[Splash]

Yep, it's pretty good. Hard drive deaded? Install the new disk and boot from the Vista DVD, point it at the image, tell it which disk to restore to and let it restore.

Not *quite* as user friendly as Acronis, but it's not bad for £free.

[PeteSmith]

I use it now instead of any 3rd party app, if you run it from the cmd line using wbadmin you can also backup to a network location, which you can't do with the windows GUI. worth noting. I believe you can also use the access the backup as a VM, i still need to test this however.

[Zak33]

cheers chaps

[TheAnimus]

For a free solution its really not bad at all!

But for all the PCs in the house a windows home server is just absolutely bloody brilliant when it comes to shear ease of use. Even the retard kids (mac users) get included!

[lodore]

If anyone here uses vista home premium or anyother version of vista that doesnt contain the full backup feature you can use imagex
its part of the waik toolkit (windows automated installation kit)
imagex is commandline but you can get gui frontends for it.
the best way is to use the waik toolkit to create a vistape disc and then use imagex commandline tool to image a partition.

for example
imagex /capture c: Z:\system partition.wim "system partition image"
the above example will work compress the image a small amount but wont verify the image.
files such as paging file etc are excluded as default.
full list of commandline options

ive used imagex quite a few times at college.

[jim]

IIRC it's powered by Ghost