Windows 7 pro backup options

Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Backup — Windows and Windows Server. Sign in to vote. Does Windows 7 Professional enable me to schedule multiple backup jobs for different backup locations and schedules?

Sunday, August 30, PM. Hi, Windows 7 backup supports one backup schedule for both data and disk image. To help us consider adding this support in future releases, can you please let me know what are your consideration in creating two backup jobs of the same data to seperate locations?

Monday, August 31, AM. Christine, I would like the ability to schedule multiple backup jobs. The jobs would be defined to create the backups to the different locations simultaneously, and each job would be scheduled separately. Monday, August 31, PM. Tuesday, September 1, AM. I will take a look at this. Most likely, I would use the separate schedule to create an image on the remote computer on the network, and the backup program for mu USB backups.

That should take care of the concerns that you voiced inb your email, since different storage areas would be used. One question - is there any way that I can tell when the job is currently running? Any process that I can see in Task Manager, for example?

Devesa 7. Hello, Imagine I use the computer both, for professional and home tasks. Currently I can't achieve this due to the limitations of the Windows Back-up feature.

Regards If it was helpful, please vote! Friday, September 11, AM. Christine - I find that Windows backup is unacceptably slow and unreliable when backing up large numbers of files. For example, I wish to back up in the region of 27, files, If i attempt to do this in one job, Windows backuip takes more than 24 hours and usually eventually fails.

If I, say, set up a job to back up 5, files, Windows backup works fine. So, I'd like to set up several backup jobs: Work files, proivate files, Pictures, Music etc etc.

If Windows Backup worked properly on the large numbers of files, this wouldn't be an issue. However, it doesn't, so we need an alternative. Saturday, September 19, PM. I had a look at it, and it really does seem somewhat simplistic. As mentioned, I too want multiple backup schedules. One for updating nightly to a USB drive, then weekly across a network. Also the ability to do incremental backups when there is a large number of files, as well as being able ti disable compression to save time.

Back to robocopy scripts for me. I think a lot of users like to have more control over their data than less. Definitely backup has been improved, however more explicit control would be great.

Monday, September 28, AM. I have a dual boot Windows 7 Ubuntu Linux machine. Instead, it reports a damaged K cluster and says that the backup has failed. When I try and restore the backed up image, the restore fails because the source and target volumes are not of the same size. So, for those who have this type of configuration, it appears that the Win 7 backup utility will not work.

Too bad, so close yet so far Maybe Microsoft can find an answer for this problem. Proposed as answer by vanilla2 Wednesday, January 13, PM. Monday, September 28, PM. I just read this tread and I think wanting multiple backups would be a common scenario for many users. Here is an example: I use a laptop for work. Whenever I am at work I am connected to my office network and want to backup all my work files to a drive in the office.

When I am at home, I am connected to my home network and want to backup my personal files to a drive on my home network. Two different backup locations, and two different schedules. One should run Monday morning and put certain files on a network drive, one should run Sunday night, and put a totally different set of files on a totally different network drive on a different network I might add.

Anyone using a laptop for both work and personal stuff a common scenario can relate to this I suspect. Friday, November 27, PM. I am very disappointed that Microsoft no longer gives customers the option to schedule multiple backup jobs in this latest operating system.

I rotate backups between 2 external drives so that one can remain offsite at all times. The scheduled backup job will not run unless it sees the specific drive it was configured for even though the assigned drive letter is the same. Therefore, I have to create a separate backup job for each external drive. This has always worked well using scheduled tasks on the older versions of Windows Backup. But, now it seems we've all taken a step backward in this regard with Windows 7.

I'm wondering what the Microsoft Engineers would recommend to solve this problem? Find a third-party backup program that does what Windows Backup used to let us do? Proposed as answer by agi14 Sunday, September 4, PM. Saturday, December 12, PM. I agree that the need for multiple backup jobs could be very common.

I'd like to back up my data files documents, email, etc daily or weekly but only backup my media files pictures, videos, music less often. The media library backup takes up a decent amount of space but doesn't change often enough that I feel the need to make them part of the backup as regularly as other folders.

Wednesday, January 13, PM. One trick to try is to leave the windows mbr in place when installing linux. Those same shares can be mapped and I can reliably move gigabytes to and from those shares from explorer. But Windows Backup starts the backup and fails saying something about a network connection no longer being available, even when it is a cat5e cable between 2 win7 boxes, and all other network connections continue to work fine.

Since the problems are easily re-created at will, is it worthwhile to file bug reports, and if so where? The file backups I get from Win 7 Backup are in the form of. I'm able to open zipped text files in a backup set via Explorer without running a restore, that seems to be a good way to browse them. This doesn't work for system images which are.

Monday, January 25, PM. You guys are right, the files are actually just zip files. The issue is that in Windows 7 when you doulble click the icon for the backed up folder the folder that contains all the files that the backup created , it tries to open it using Windows Restore. You have to right click on it and select Open, or open it some other way. That had me thinking that the files were inaccessible. Hello Christine, i do not know whether you still get alerts for this Thread I create a backup on one of these two disks, go with this disk to my bank, store it in the safe, take with me at home the other one of these two disks that was in the safe, wait one or two months, create again backup on that disk, go to the bank, This is around 20 GB wort of data and includes among other my Word documents,.

For me, with my large amount of photo files, I can not afford to do often a Full Backup. In this context, I should also describe that I want to keep my photo file backups for a long period of time.

Because it is quite likely, that it is only in one or two years that I will detect current problems wit a subset of my photos I have a lot of photos, that I will only look-at again in one or two years. Therefore, I do not want a solution that because of disk space considerations will need to overwrite a 6 month old Full Backup with the most current Full Backup.

I therefore need to avoid frequent switching from Incremental backup to a new Full Backup. This is especially important for the relative fragility of incremental backups incremental backups are more fragile, because they depend on the availability and quality of multiple backups. This is why I recently decided to perform my weekly incremental backups with Windows Backup as opposed to a incremental backup with a Backup Software that I bougt recently from another Software Company and that is faster and more flexible but less reliable than Windows Backup.

In a attempt to "keep it simple", too much information has been sacrified in the documentation. Even the otherwise excellent "Windows 7 Inside Outside" book does not contain sufficient descriptions. I am loosing extremely much time, just because of the lack of detailed documentation.

Backing Up reliably is for a lot of users something essential Thursday, January 28, PM. It is only now, that it came to my mind, that I should perhaps highlight, that in my real-life scenario described in my previous post it is not just " creating two backup jobs of the same data to seperate locations" that I need to do.

Instead it is with four different backups jobs, that I need to backup the same data to different locations. What are the 4 different jobs? Note: it is only for the backup, that this disk is connected to my PC. Therefore it is probably "manually" as opposed to a scheduler-based automatism , that I will start this Backup Job. Currently, this is a backup to the same disk but to other folders of that disk as for job 1 above. Finally, I should probably also describe, that in the past, it happened only a couple of time, that I created "ad hoc" additional backup-jobs.

But I do not remember anymore, how important this was for me. I should also describe that on my old XP-based PC, I had already implemented since a long number of years the scenario that I described in this thread. With one difference however: I was not performing incremental backups. But I was nevertheless using Nt backup, because nt-backup was preserving the NFS encryption within the backup. Because of the lack of flexibility of "Windows Backup" of Windows 7, I can unfortunately not do all my backups with the very reliable Windows Backup.

Therfore, it is only my weekly incremental backups these are for me the most important backups, that need to be very reliable that I am currently creating with Windows Backup. For the other backups I intend but depending on what I will learn, this might change to use another Software.

I would prefer much more not at all because of Software license costs to be able to do all my backups with the same very reliable Windows Backup Software niot just because of its reliability; but because it is for me much more simple and efficient to become knowledgable and confident with one Software than with multiple Software having different UIs and different pecuilarities. Friday, January 29, AM. This has also been originally quite confusing for me.

And I guess, that this will also be confusing for other W7-newbies. But perhaps, the current behavior is "by design" in order to remind the user, that this is a special folder and that he should be careful not to change its content.

Saturday, January 30, PM. Greg, I do not know if a non-expert like me, is allowed to provide partial answers without being able to garantee, that they are correct. But partial non-authoritative answers from a non-expert are nevertheless better than no answers at all. But in addition, when Windows Backup WB is performing an incremental backup e. This will allow the user, when performing an eventual Restore operation, to decide whether it is to the point-in-time of the most recent WB run or to the point-in-time of a previous run of WB, that the System shall get restored.

When playing around without proceeding to a Restore with the Windows Recovery Environment WinRe , I could verify thatWinRe effectively offered me the option to restore my System either to the point-in-time of the most current WB run or to the point-in-time of a previous WB run. It is therefore not very simple for a user to forecast reliably how long the "previous images" that have been stored by an incremental backup run will remain available for a Restore.

Sunday, January 31, AM. The information is on a Webpage titled "Learn more about system image backup" and is authored by "the Storage Team at Microsoft" I highligted myself with "bold" what you might be most interested in. Do not store the image on a dynamic disk — a system image stored on a dynamic disk will provide limited functionality during restore. Specifically, the restore will be supported only if the partitioning on the source disk has not been changed.

Therefore if your hard disk failed and is replaced with new hardware, you will not be able to restore the image. NTFS formatted internal or external hard disks supports Volume Shadow Copy, hence they support storing multiple versions of backup image.

Next it will ask you to select where you want to save your backup. Choose the backup destination and click Next. Then you can select what to back up on your Windows 7 or 10 PC.

It offers two options. You can choose one preferred option. Let Windows choose: Windows will back up data and files saved in libraries, desktop, default Windows folders. It will also create a system image and you can use it to restore your computer if it stops working one day. However, this option will not back up program files, things formatted in FAT file system , Recycle Bin files, and temporary files larger than 1GB.

Let me choose: You can freely choose the files, folders and directories to back up. You can also choose whether to include a system image in the backup. Here we choose Let me choose and click Next.

After you choose what to back up, you can review your backup settings. Check Run backup on a schedule box, and you set how often you want to back up the chosen files. Then the selected items will be backed up on a regular schedule. Then you can click Save settings and run backup , and it will start backing up the selected items on your Windows 10 or 7 computer.

Windows 10 repair, recovery, reboot, reinstall, restore solutions. Follow the guide above to open Windows Backup and Restore center. Select Save backup copies of your files with File History from the list of results.

Select it from the list of results, then select Backup and Restore Windows 7. Select another backup to restore files from , select the location of your external storage device, and follow the instructions to restore your files. Recovery options in Windows Open Backup Settings. Use File History to back up to an external drive or network location.

In the search box on the taskbar, type restore files , and then select Restore your files with File History. When you find the version you want, select Restore to save it in its original location. To save it in a different place, right-click Restore , select Restore to , and then choose a new location. Find your backups created on previous versions of Windows.

If you used Backup and Restore to back up files or create system image backups in previous versions of Windows, your old backup is still available in Windows In the search box on the taskbar, type control panel. Windows 11 Windows 10 More Restore files with File History Connect the external storage device that contains your backup files.

Follow the instructions to restore your files.