Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with WindowsXP and backup

Best simple Windows backup software?

fishmasta — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:37:05 -0800

Looking for good easy-to-use Windows backup software. I'm looking for a backup solution for my dad that will be as easy to use as possible. He's not very computer savvy so the simpler the better. Basically I'm looking into something similar to Time Machine for OS X that will automatically update his backup drive every time he plugs it in with an option to restore from his backup should anything crash. He's currently on Windows XP, but is looking at getting a laptop (which presumably will have Windows 7 installed), so something that will function well across both would be best. Thanks!

How can I use my external hard disk drive to regularly backup my Windows XP laptop?

grouse — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:08:43 -0800

How can I use my external hard disk drive to regularly backup my Windows XP laptop in as simple a manner as possible? Ideally, I would want something that works like Time Machine on the Mac—I would really like something I can set and forget. Free solutions are best, obviously, but I'm willing to buy software for this. I've read some of the previous backup questions, but figured there might be new recommendations by now.

Older Gmail Messages Into Thunderbird

davidstandaford — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:42:32 -0800

How do I backup my gmail account and get all of my older gmail messages into Thunderbird on Windows XP? I'm trying to backup gmail using Thunderbird and it's not downloading older messages. When I installed Thunderbird and set it up with my gmail account it downloaded messages going back to 6/22/2009 4:08 AM. I have no idea where Thunderbird got that date from.

I have emails much older than that and when I tell Thunderbird to get messages it only downloads the newer ones. How do I get Thunderbird to backup all of those older gmail messages onto my computer.

If there is any other information I can provide that would help I'll update in comments.

Moving old data to a new drive

Zaximus — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:19:50 -0800

I am upgrading my PC and I have questions regarding transferring my data. This is probably a total newbie question but I can't seem to find a straight answer anywhere. I will be installing a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card, RAM, and 640GB hard drive into my case. I am planning on doing a clean install of XP and SP3 onto the new drive.

Once the new system boots up, I want to plug in my old 160GB HD (also SATA) and pick off all the files I want to keep, which would mostly be several gigs of music and the entirety of the My Documents folder. The old drive also has XP installed on it.

As long as I ensure that I boot up from the larger, newer HD, this should work fine, correct? Is there much risk involved in this process? If the total amount of data to be transferred is less than 10GB and I don't need to clone the entirety of the old disk and old OS, is there a safer way to go about this?

Thanks in advance.

How DO you backup Windows XP?

Ikazuchi — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:56:18 -0800

My mom and my brother are looking for a simple, solid online backup solution for their Windows XP computers. I know that there are sites like Carbonite, Mozy, and Crashplan. What I don't know is how good or simple any of these sites are or if there are others that are better that I just don't know about. Also, how heavily does the background services these site's software install impact system performance?

System recovery disk without a floppy drive

sotalia — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:49:05 -0800

When doing a backup in Windows XP, how the heck do I create an "ASR recovery diskette" without a floppy drive? I have a laptop on which I'm running Windows XP. I used the Backup utility that came with Windows to back up my entire computer onto an external hard drive. A backup file was created. However, at the end of the backup process, I got an error message saying that an ASR recovery diskette could not be created because there is no floppy drive. Does this mean that I cannot use my backup file to restore my system onto a new hard drive if my current hard drive fails? Is there some way to tell the Backup utility to create a recovery diskette using a CD instead? The Backup Wizard didn't give me an option to do this.

As an aside...I haven't seen a laptop with a floppy drive in years. I can't believe that Microsoft would force people to create recovery diskettes on floppies! Grrrrr....

Fully Automated XP Restore?

TheSlate — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:58:30 -0800

How do I fully automate restoring my Windows XP test machines to a clean state on a daily basis? My requirements are:
1. Partition images cannot be larger than the used space of the partiton
2. Reimaging can't take more than 4 hours for partitions with about 8 gigs used with a 20 gig capacity, preferably a lot faster
3. Software used must be Acronis True Image 9.1, included with Windows, and/or free
4. The process must be fully automated or pretty close and run unattended, i.e. no booting from a LiveCD or clicking lots of buttons

Currently, I use Acronis True Image 9.1 to create the images, but it only seems to support automated backups and not restores. Acronis supports scripts, but I can't find any documentation on it. I've looked into using dd, but it takes forever and the image sizes are too big. I've looked into other free software, but anything interesting only works on Linux. I've looked into other non-free software, but I barely have the budget for Acronis.

Ideally, I'd like to have scheduled tasks on a remote machine kick off the reimaging process on each of my test machines, then (optionally) have each machine download/install updates and backup again.

Thanks!

XP unusably slow after STOP errors and running checkdisk - what's going on?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:29:42 -0800

So it's come to this - I see no other option than to ask a "help me fix my PC" question. After some troubleshooting the STOP errors seem to have been resolved, XP now boots successfully but is excruciating slow to the point of being unusable. Details and specs below the fold. Specifications:
-Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
-1 x 512 MB RAM
-XP Pro SP2
-PCI Firewire card
-onboard: USB 2.0, VIA Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IDE config:

1M: HD Maxtor 80 GB U-ATA
1S: empty
2M: DVD Burner
2S: DVD-ROM

First, the BIOS would occasionally fail to find the boot device (HD). Setting the primary master to "Not Installed" and rebooting, and then back to "Auto" remedied this for the time being.

Then a few days ago the machine started throwing a bunch of BSODs during normal operation. I recorded some of them for your viewing pleasure:

0x000000F4, 0x00000003, 0x829FF020, 0x829FF194 0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x05357000 0x0000007A (0XC03E1128, 0XC0000185, 0XF844A074, 0X08195860) ACPI.SYS 0x0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X8054AE34, 0XF6505BF4, 0X00000000)

Eventually XP wouldn't boot at all: system32/config was 'corrupted', or something along those lines. I assume this happened as a result of one of the STOP errors.

For some reason CHKDSK wouldn't run on this machine, so I took out the drive and ran CHKDSK on it with the drive attached to another machine. It did find a bunch of errors and corrected them all.

I put it back in its own box, and ran CHKDSK again from the Recovery Console (ran fine this time, and found no errors) and also a FIXBOOT for good measure.

Which brings us to the current situation. The system32/config error is gone, and Windows does boot, *but*:

-The XP splash screen fades in very slowly and seems halted here and there.
-Upon logon, the desktop background loads but no icons or taskbar appear.
-I can load explorer and systray via taskmgr, and sometimes they eventually load on their own without intervention, but this takes a *long* time. Somewhere in the ten minutes order of magnitude.

So technically speaking, Windows now runs, but it's so excruciatingly slow it's basically unusable.

Additional details:
-I have run a Spybot Search & Destroy scan: it found some threats and removed them. No new findings upon further boots and/or Spybot runs.
-I would scan for viruses, but I can't install AVG Free: I just removed the old 7.1 version (had to anyway as it was no longer supported), and the 7.5 installer happily skips from "pick a directory" to "Installation Complete!" but never seems to have touched a file at all! Doesn't even create the specified directory in Program Files.
-Network now also doesn't work. The Network Connections window says "Connected" but the machine receives no IP address nor lease from router. Router and rest of network are running fine.
-I tried System Restore with a variety of restore points from the past two weeks or so, but after going through the process (which also takes very long) it reboots and tells me that restoring to the previous point failed.

In short, I'm confused and could really use your insight. What's causing this and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed upon this. If you have any questions or need any further details, I'd be happy to answer and provide them.

Help me backup my dad's computer and emails!

sperose — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:57:35 -0800

My dad needs help with total computer backup (particularly Outlook). Computer in question is an older Dell model, running Windows XP. No one in our family is a computer genius. More information and particular stickyness inside. My dad has been reading a lot of articles in the newspapers lately about the dangers of HDs failing and whatnot. We've had a history of failures (namely my computer, 3 drives and counting) and so it's a bit freaky. He had a severe HD failure a few years back and his solution was to take it to Best Buy and have them attempt to save as much information as they could. They burned it to CD and when he bought a new HD, he had them install it along with another HD (so under My Computer it comes up as Local Disk C: and Backup D:) where all of his backed up files from the failed HD are.
He wants to backup his files (basically only Excel spreadsheets and Word docs) as well as all his email which he reads through Outlook and his IE favorites.

How can he do this so if both the HDs fail, he has some way of getting to his files and his emails?

He's looked into using a flash drive (which is what I use to half-assedly backup my stuff, basically only important documents) but he's not sure what would be the best way. Something that is absurdly easy to understand and explain and possibly able to be completely automated would be best.

(Like I said before, no one in our family is exactly a computer genius. He hates Firefox, and believes everything that Microsoft puts out is golden, FWIW.)

Help me AskMefi!

Setting up my new HDD

jewishbuddha — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:00:06 -0800

What should I do with my new hard drive? I just got a new 80gb drive for my laptop that I'm planning to install in the next few days, and I'm looking for advice on how to set it up. Should I partition? Do you have a good method of organizing/managing your files? Recommended disk utilities? Back-up or maintenance routines?

If it helps, I currently have about 25gb on the 30gb drive I'm replacing. It's 14gb of music, 1.5gb of pictures, another gig or so of misc. documents. The rest is windows bloat and applications. One of the motivations for the new drive is to have storage for higher res pictures. I'm a student (for another month!) and my future employer will be providing me a new computer, so this is just for personal use.

I'm running XP Pro on a Dell Latitude x300. I'll be keeping the 30gb drive in a USB enclosure and can use it for back-ups, emergency booting, etc.

I got some good tips in these threads, but would like to hear more. I figure if I'm starting with a clean slate, now is a good time to pick up some good habits.

Security fits

caution live frogs — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:42:13 -0800

WindowsXP, 250 gig shared backup hard drive, and a lab full of people with sensitive information that needs to be backed up on said drive but shouldn't be accessible by anyone other than the user who put it there. Security is giving me fits and I'd appreciate some helpful advice. [more gory details inside] we have a lab full of computers. all of us need to back up our stuff but a lot of us have sensitive documents we'd rather not share with everyone else (student/co-worker evaluations, course material, test banks, etc.) we have only one spot to back up, a 250 gig USB hard drive attached to our lab server. we all have our own designated back-up folder on this drive. here's where it gets fun:

the drive is shared on the network to our lab computers only. we're not in a domain, just firewalls between us and the outside, access limited by IP range. there's probably not much i can do about this as we don't have control over the network, just our computers. so far anything i copy to this drive is openly shared with everyone else in our lab, and i can't seem to lock it down such that any one network user can only read/modify one folder. everyone in the lab is currently using Win2K Pro or WinXP Pro.

using my own stuff as a test case, i tried creating a user on the lab server, encrypting files, then logging off. when the system restarts the default account has access to all my encrypted files. i don't know why. if i do the reverse (encrypt then log on with my settings) i can't open the encrypted file.

i tried limiting access for that file to my user account only, ocking out the default lab account we normally run on the machine. no luck. if the default lab account is locked out, nobody can access the files through the network.

only thing i can think of is that the default lab account used to be the old Win2K administrator account before i renamed it while upgrading to XP.

so... anybody else actually get something like this to work? any third-party solution that will cost us as little as possible? oh, i ought to mention that my PI is very non-technical, so whatever solution i come up with will have to continue to work after i've left the lab. any help at all here is appreciated.

(and yes i do realize that "secure" in this instance ain't really so secure - we're not trying to keep out hard-core hackers here, we're just trying to make sure we have a simple data backup solution while also keeping the people in our lab from having one-click access to their own employee reviews.)

Windows ME to XP upgrade questions

Termite — Sun, 02 May 2004 22:30:42 -0800

The bell tolls for ME. Help this loser to upgrade from Windows ME to XP Pro. [4 questions inside...] I have two hard drives. The operating system and all programs are on hard drive 1; all the files are on HD 2. If I do a clean install on HD 1, to make sure anything that could cause problems is wiped out, what will happen to my files on HD 2? Do I have to backup HD 2 on CD-R and load everything back? That's about 27 GB, so I'm not looking forward to it...

When upgrading to XP, people recommend changing the file system from FAT32 to NTFS. What about the files on hard drive 2? Can I convert hard drive 2 to NTFS without damaging the files?

Where is the desktop background picture hidden? I've made my own and I'd like to save it.

Finally, could someone explain why I shouldn't log into the computer as administrator? It seems like I need to create two accounts for myself - administrator and user.