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Creating a Complete Backup with Wbadmin

Once you have your Vista PC up and running and have the programs you want installed, it might be a wise idea to create a backup of your system's drive.

Sure, I know what you are thinking, "Backups? They're not cool. They're not sexy." Well, you would be absolutely correct about that but a good backup can really save your tail in a pinch. Fortunately, Micorsoft Vista includes a snappy little program called wbadmin that can do this task for you and probably do it much faster than you would expect.

Wbadmin is a backup command line tool that comes installed with Vista. It has a pretty good compression ratio (I backed up just the OS and an install of Office 2007 which clocked in at around 11GB to a backup file that was about 6GB). Most amazingly, at least to me, was that my 1.7GHz machine with 1GB memory backed up the entire C: drive in about 7 minutes.

Here's how it works.

First, you have to be logged in as an account with administrative privilidges. Additionally, the destination of the backup has to be formatted with NTFS.

Second, ensure that the destination location is not on the same partition as the system (C:) drive and the destination is at least 75% of the used size of the system drive. More is obviously always better.

Third, open a command prompt from the Run line and type the following:

WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:f: -include:c: -quiet

In this example, I am backing up the C: drive and placing that backup on the F: drive. This will happen without further user interaction with the -quiet switch.

If you would prefer to back up specific folders, you would simply type in the folders seperated by a comma, like this:

-include:c:\temp,d:\mountpoint

The backup file will be created and future backups of the same drive will only back up the changes since the last backup (delta) which will make it run much faster. Additionally, the backup file is saved as a .VHD file, which is Microsofts Virtual Hard Disk file format and theoretically could be mounted as a virtual PC using Microsoft Virtual PC.

In conclusion, this is a command line tool that everyone should use. Those who consider themselves as experienced with computers know to do this, though I suspect rarely actually do. PC users who are unfamiliar with computers definitely should use this tool. If your hard drive fails, do you really want to pay Geek Squad or the neighbor kid $100 to get you running again when running this one time can get you back up and running in minutes for free? I know I don't.
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