can anyone help me ,,,,,, I have no backup wizard in my system tools.. xp is
giving me troubles & looks as if I might have to reformat.. be nice if I
could backup..manythanks
--
scott

scott wrote:

> can anyone help me ,,,,,, I have no backup wizard in my system
> tools



XP Home?

Backup is installed automatically on XP Professional, but not on XP Home. If
you have the complete XP Home CD, find backup on the CD, in
\ValueAdd\MSFT\NTBACKUP and install it yourself by doubleclicking the file
ntbackup.msi.

If you don't have an XP CD, you can download ntbackup.msi at
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/ntbackup.msi Also see
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=302894


> xp is giving me troubles & looks as if I might have to
> reformat.. be nice if I could backup..manythanks


It is very rare that that the extreme step of reformatting is required to
solve a problem. If you have problems, post them here; it's likely that
someone can help you and a reinstallation won't be required.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup

scott wrote:

> can anyone help me ,,,,,, I have no backup wizard in my system tools.. xp is
> giving me troubles & looks as if I might have to reformat.. be nice if I
> could backup..manythanks

To add to what others have said and for the future, you should always
have a full and complete backup. Data loss is a situation of when, not if.

Ntbackup, the backup program native to XP, cannot backup to DVD and will
only backup to CD if other 3rd party CD burning software is available
and even with that it will not span CDs, i.e. one CD is the limit, which
is not very practical. It is geared toward tape drives or other hard
drives. It will work ok in backing up to an external hard drive (or
network drive) and restoring individual files / folders is ok, but if
you need to restore the complete drive it's cumbersome. XP must be
installed first. If you have XP Pro, Ntbackup has an ASR feature
(Automated System Recovery) which makes this restore of a boot/system
drive easier but still it takes much longer than an imaging program, and
I never got it to restore my system to full functionality as it was when
the backup was made. It also mandates that a floppy drive be available.
One floppy disk is created in the ASR process and there is no way
around that. ASR is not available on XP Home addition.

There are other good alternatives. One is to use an imaging program.
This makes an exact image of the partition which can be saved on CD/DVD
or to another drive - internal or external. Imaging to an external USB
2.0 / Firewire drive works well. Then occasionally burning an image to
DVD gives you redundancy. Restores can be done of the entire partition
or individual files / folders. These work well and make it easy to
recover from a drive crash. Examples of this are:

Norton Ghost 10
Acronis True Image
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
CasperXP

The second option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's
Backup My PC. This is an excellent tool. It is the evolution of
ntbackup. There are other good backup programs out there as well. This
can do a complete backup or backup individual files and folders to
DVD/CD and other drives.

Good luck.

--
Rock
MS MVP Windows - Shell/User