Backup Computer Windows XP

If you are a Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Home edition user, you might already know that you need backups, going through life without them is almost like wearing a t-shirt with all your bank account details including PIN numbers printed on it and going for a walk on a busy street.

If you are going to back up your entire system, the easiest and most reliable way is to do a disk image backup. A disk image backup means that the backup software will take a “snapshot” of your entire hard disk and will copy all its contents to a backup storage location. We call this the most reliable way as that way you can restore more than just your personal files, but also your system, applications and settings in a breeze.

Image backups are big, as big as your current hard drive’s used space (which you can check on My PC or My Computer by selecting your hard disk drive and looking at the nice pie chart that shows o the left side). Some disk imaging programs will try to apply some compression so that the backup image is smaller than the actual drive, but sometimes the size will just decrease a few megabytes, so be prepared to store a big backup.

If you don’t have a spare hard drive (either internal or external) that you can use to store your backup, the best option is to split it to several CDs or DVDs and keep them in a dark, cool place.

There are freeware and open source tools that will get the job done, like CloneZilla or PING, however if you love fancy interfaces and commercial support, you could go for a product like Norton Ghost, which will also create full hard drive images and will also allow you to restore your entire system easily.

There are other backup methods, but for a Windows XP full computer backup, we recommend the image method, as there are some files that are always changing and that are locked by the system (like pagefile.sys that sits in your main drive’s root directory – commonly c:) and that will cause other backup methods to fail. Image backups usually require a reboot into a small trimmed down operating system instead of Windows just to avoid that problem.

However if you’re just backing up a folder or some files, you can always do a manual backup by just copying and pasting those files and folders to an external drive.