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Fast repair doesn’t ask for any further input.

6. Follow the onscreen instructions and insert the ERD when prompted.

7. Your system will be inspected and, if possible, restored. When the process finishes, the system restarts.

Windows XP Automated System Recovery (ASR) The Windows XP Automated System Recovery (ASR) looks and acts very similar to the Windows 2000 ERD. The ASR Wizard lets you create a backup of your system. This backup includes a floppy disk and backup media (tape or CD-R) containing the system partition and disks containing operating system components (Figure 17-41).

The restore side of ASR involves a complete reinstallation of the operating system, preferably on a new partition. This is something you do when all is lost. Run Setup and press F2 when prompted during the text-mode portion of Setup. Follow the prompts on the screen, which will first ask for the floppy disk and then for the backup media.

Backup Wizard Data files are not backed up by the ERD or by the ASR. Therefore, you have to back up data files. If you run the Backup Wizard and click the Next button on the Welcome screen, you’ll open the dialog box in Figure 17-42. You have three options here. The first two are fairly self-explanatory: You can back up everything or just selected drives and files.

The third option needs some explanation. The Only back up the System State data radio button enables you to save “other” system-critical files, but with Windows 2000/XP, it’s not much more than making an ERD with the Registry backup. This option really makes sense for Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 systems because it saves Active Directory information (which your Windows 2000/XP systems do not store) as well as other critical, server-specific functions. (I cover more on these topics in Chapter 23, “Local Area Networking.”) But the CompTIA A+ certification exams may still expect you to know about it!

Figure 17-41 Creating an ASR backup

Figure 17-42 Backup Wizard options

Tape Backup The odd fact that Microsoft has not updated the Backup or Restore Wizard to enable you to back up to optical discs of any sort has kept alive the practice of tape backups. Tape drives connect to the ATA or SCSI bus, just like optical drives, but rather than using a shiny CD-R or DVD+R disc, you have to back up to magnetic tape (Figure 17-43).

Figure 17-43 Backup tapes

Tape drive manufacturers have done pretty much everything they can do to make tape backups as fast as possible, but the technology suffers from two huge drawbacks. First, it’s tape, which means all data must be stored and restored in sequential access. In other words, the drive has to go through files 1 and 2 before reaching file 3, in other words. Second, tape is painfully slow in comparison to hard drives, optical drives, or Flash-media drives.

The only great benefit to tape is that it’s relatively cheap to buy multiple tapes with a lot of storage capacity. With hard drive and recordable DVD prices at rock bottom today, though, tape’s days are numbered.

Backup Options The goal of backing up data is to ensure that when a system dies, there will be an available, recent copy you can use to restore the system. You could simply back up the complete system at the end of each day—or whatever interval you feel is prudent to keep the backups fresh—but complete backups can be a tremendous waste of time and materials. Instead of backing up the entire system, take advantage of the fact that all the files won’t be changed in any given period; much of the time you only need to back up what’s changed since your last backup. Recognizing this, most backup software solutions have a series of options available beyond the complete backup.

The key to understanding backups other than the full backup is attributes, 1-bit storage areas that all files have. The most common attributes are Hidden (don’t show the file in Computer or when dir is typed at the command line), System (it’s a critical file for the system), Read-Only (can