Win7 back up (lol)

[philo]

I know better than to use Microsoft backup. Ever since the days of DOS
it has been one bad utility.

Just for the heck of it, I had an opportunity to test it out...I figured
after 30 years maybe MS got it working.

I decommissioned a Win7 machine due to bad mobo capacitors.
Since I caught it before the machine failed I thought I'd back up to an
external drive, then restore on my new machine.

My "new" machine was a spare XP_64 machine with the OS on the C: drive
I did a fresh install of Win7 on the D: drive, then restored the backup.

On reboot, none of the data was where I expected it...
It "restored" the data to the wrong drive!

Sheesh!

Or was there some setting I missed?

Anyway , lesson learned...I should have done it manually like I usually do.

 

[Wolf K]

I know better than to use Microsoft backup. Ever since the days of DOS
it has been one bad utility.

Just for the heck of it, I had an opportunity to test it out...I figured
after 30 years maybe MS got it working.

I decommissioned a Win7 machine due to bad mobo capacitors.
Since I caught it before the machine failed I thought I'd back up to an
external drive, then restore on my new machine.

My "new" machine was a spare XP_64 machine with the OS on the C: drive
I did a fresh install of Win7 on the D: drive, then restored the backup.

On reboot, none of the data was where I expected it...
It "restored" the data to the wrong drive!

Sheesh!

Or was there some setting I missed?

Anyway , lesson learned...I should have done it manually like I usually do.

I assume "wrong drive" means C:. If so, it's not surprising: AFAIK, Win
backup records the drive from which it backed up the data. I have no
idea whether you can change this default.

Have a good day.

 

[Dex]

I know better than to use Microsoft backup. Ever since the days of DOS
it has been one bad utility.

Just for the heck of it, I had an opportunity to test it out...I figured
after 30 years maybe MS got it working.

I decommissioned a Win7 machine due to bad mobo capacitors.
Since I caught it before the machine failed I thought I'd back up to an
external drive, then restore on my new machine.

My "new" machine was a spare XP_64 machine with the OS on the C: drive
I did a fresh install of Win7 on the D: drive, then restored the backup.

On reboot, none of the data was where I expected it...
It "restored" the data to the wrong drive!

Sheesh!

Or was there some setting I missed?

Anyway , lesson learned...I should have done it manually like I usually do.

When I tried it I set it to back up ONLY the C: drive, it tried to
backup D: (nearly 300GB of stuff) as well, couldn't find a way to stop it.

 

[philoÂ]

I assume "wrong drive" means C:. If so, it's not surprising: AFAIK, Win
backup records the drive from which it backed up the data. I have no
idea whether you can change this default.

Have a good day.

Ah yes, that makes sense.
I should have thought of that.
I saw no way to specify the default setting, but I was not looking very
hard.

It was no big deal, I just copied the data to where I wanted it...
just wasted a bit of time.

 

[philo]

When I tried it I set it to back up ONLY the C: drive, it tried to
backup D: (nearly 300GB of stuff) as well, couldn't find a way to stop it.

As far as choosing which stuff I wanted to back up, that part was good
as I could specify exactly what I wanted.

In my case I only had 20 gigs of data, it was more a matter of curiosity
to see how Windows backup worked. If I was restoring back to the same
drive letter it probably would have been fine.

 

[Dominique]

When I tried it I set it to back up ONLY the C: drive, it tried to
backup D: (nearly 300GB of stuff) as well, couldn't find a way to stop it.

One way to stop it is to deactivate your D drive in device manager before
doing the backup and reactivate it after.

I have a dual-boot system with XP and Seven and everytime I want to create
a system image with the Win7 utility, it wants to include the XP drive, the
Seven drive and another drive which only contains data, so I disable that
data drive in device manager, create the image which now only includes the
XP and Seven drive, then I reenable the data drive. Works fine so far.

HTH