In this Nugget, we talk about configuring
backup and file recovery.
I remember as my kids were growing up that digital
photography was just starting to emerge.
And I bought my first digital camera--
can't remember how many megapixels it was.
I think it was like 1.4 megapixels.
So it was pretty small.
But I had a whole bunch of pictures of my kids from when
they were growing up.
And then, about, oh, maybe 10 years ago or so-- this is a
while back now--
I was backing up using tape.
And these were just 40 gigabit compressed [? Travon ?] tapes
and they would run every night.
This is also about the time I started
recording for CBT Nuggets.
And the tapes were so loud, that sometimes you could hear
them on a recording.
So I'd have to either stop recording or
stop the tape backup.
So I decided, you know what?
This is ridiculous.
I am just going to erase all these tapes.
And that's what I did.
And then I sold them in a garage sale.
Now who in a garage sales would know what
a tape backup was?
They probably thought they were VCR tapes and tried to
stick them in their VCRs or something.
Anyway, and then I said, instead I'm going to use this
online backup service.
And so I used an online service.
And that's when this whole thing was starting to emerge,
but before cloud computing really became
big like it is now.
Anyway, through a mishap--
a series of mishaps--
all my information, all my kids' pictures got lost.
It was an awful feeling.
Well, fortunately, through many different generations of
Windows now they've improved backups every
step along the way.
And what we're going to take a look at right here-- and I
want to drag the exam objectives over here in
particular--
is this configure backup, and recovery options, and
specifically configure backup.
Now here's the thing.
When we take a look at this-- and if you read the
description for system recovery disk backup files,
folders, and full system, and then scheduled backups--
all of these objectives-- doesn't really
say it here in writing.
All of these objectives actually relate to Windows 7.
Yeah.
I'll show you what I mean by that.
Let me drag that back over here.
When we go into Control Panel here--
let me get down here.
Control Panel-- oh.
I keep missing it.
Let's try that again.
Oh, finally.
There is.
So then we go into System and Security.
We go down here to something that's new with Windows they
called File History.
But the fact of matter is, even though I click on File
History here and we see some configuration that we can do
over on the left, this is not really what we're talking
about here in that exam objective.
Now File History is in the exam objectives further on
down the list if we were to keep on reading.
It's in a totally different domain of objectives.
What we're really looking at here is this.
Windows 7 File Recovery.
That's right.
I don't know why they do it this way, but you click on
Windows 7 File Recovery and it takes us back to the old
Windows 7 method for doing things.
And it's not really that old and it's actually pretty good.
But here it is.
And you can see that I've already created a backup of my
harddrive here just because it takes all time and I wanted to
do that in advance.
And let's say that I have a file that I really want to
back up that's very important to me now.
I just had a single file here.
It's the only thing I could think of to backup.
And it's this picture right here of the monsoon season
here in Arizona.
We just get overcome with gigantic walls of dust.
It's kind of like what you'd see in the movie The Mummy, if
you've ever seen that, where a wall of dust
overtakes an airplane.
Well, it's a lot like that here in Phoenix.
And we call these haboobs.
You could also call them a monsoon, but it's much more
fun to say haboob.
Anyway, so that's it.
That's the picture I want to make sure that I am
able to back up.
And you can see that I've made my backup.
All right.
Now here I switch to another computer to show you how to
set up the Windows backup if you haven't done so already,
as opposed to the machine that I just showed you where I've
already done that.
So I go to Windows 7 File Recovery.
I click on Setup Backup.
And one of the key things it'll do here is look for an
eligible drive where a backup could be made.
There's one right there.
I'll click on Next.
And then I'll choose Let Windows Choose.
Now, there's a couple things to keep in mind here.
First of all, when we look for the backup media, I happen to
have another internal drive that was already available,
didn't have anything on it.
And so I just made it available for a backup.
Once you choose that drive, it'll no longer have a drive
letter because Microsoft doesn't want you to mix and
match user files with the backup files that are on your
backup drive.
They don't want it to be used for cross purposes like that,
so that it's dedicated to only backup.
Also, when you choose Let Windows Choose it will also
create what we call an image of your operating system.
So it's pretty much a full snapshot or an image of your
entire C drive, for most people.
That way, at a later point in time, if the harddrive were to
fail or we were to upgrade to a larger harddrive, we could
just use that image and restore the whole image to the
new harddrive and it would be the same as if we had never
missed a beat.
It would have all of our settings and all of our data
in files right there.
And it's very similar in that respect to third party imaging
solutions, where it takes an exact picture of your computer
harddrive, and then you can restore it elsewhere in the
future to get everything back.
Now this is going to also back up things such as your
libraries, whatever is in your documents, your videos, your
pictures, that sort of thing, as well as your
user profile settings.
But not necessarily anything beyond those specific
directories unless you designate those, such as in a
Let Me Choose option, where I would click on Next and then I
would make my own selections.
For example, maybe I don't really care
about this user's stuff.
So I could deselect that user and that user and I could make
sure that I keep only my own libraries.
And then I could also choose my own harddrive right down
here, which--
notice that it's not selected.
That's really because it doesn't have to be since it's
going to include a system image of drive C. This means
that it's going to include absolutely everything on drive
C.
So then we would simply click on Next.
And then I could, at this point, Save
Settings and Run Backup.
I also see here that a system repair disk might be required
to restore a system image.
You see, if I replace my harddrive with a new one,
well, there's no operating system on there.
And you don't have to install Windows if you've got a system
image, because I could just use the backup system image to
restore the entire old harddrive to the new one.
But I have to have a way of booting the operating system.
And a repair disk is a way of being able to get that.
The repair disk is not technically necessary if you
also have a Windows 8 operating system installation
desk, because booting from that you can choose a Repair
Installation and instead go that route.
But regardless, once you're done, you click Save Settings
and Run Backup and it will do its thing
and create the backup.
You may have also noticed that I don't have a
schedule going on here.
By default, it backs up every Sunday at seven PM.
You can turn the schedule back on quite easily.
I just turned mine off arbitrarily.
But by default, it has the schedule turned on.
There we go.
So now it's turned on.
If you don't want Sunday at seven PM, you can change the
settings here, which takes you through a wizard.
And if you want to change anything here,
you don't have to.
I'm already on Drive F. I'm going to stay with that.
I'm already going to continue to let Windows choose the
selections for backup.
I'll click on Next there.
And then this is where you would change the schedule.
And I would just say every week or
every day, every month.
Whatever it is that you want.
And you get the idea here.
You'll just run according to whatever schedule you specify
in that interface.
You also have an opportunity up here to manage space.
Now, it has created a system image backup for me.
And it's telling me that I have a system image down here.
I can free up disk space by changing which backups are
going to be used for the system images.
So it says Let Windows Manage the Space Used for Backup
History or Keep Only the Latest Version.
Now if I do that one, it's going to
free up a lot of space.
But I could potentially lose out on a known good
configuration as well.
So if you have the space available, go ahead--
I recommend--
go ahead and leave as many as possible on there.
You can also free of disk space by deleting a file
backups, data file backups.
And I've only got one backup here.
But if I had multiple backups and I knew that there was some
that were really old and that didn't really matter, I could
delete those and free up some space as well.
And then as I close that up, I also want to point out over
here that we could create a system image.
Now this would be independent of the image that's already in
this backup.
I could create a system image here and I could back it up to
whatever destination I chose.
I don't really have any other drives here, but if I had some
other drive or if I wanted to save it on a network location
like in a network share, I could do that as well.
That, again, might be very useful if I didn't previously
have an image and I want to just create a quick image here
so that I could upgrade my harddrive or move my image to
a different machine, something like that.
One of the exam objectives also says that you need to
create a system recovery disk, which is really the same as
this system repair disk.
That's really pretty simply.
You just simply click the little link there.
And then you burn it to a DVD.
That's it.
So I'll cancel that for the time being.
And then I'll show you also how you would boot to that
here in a little while.
Now let's go ahead and--
first of all, before I do that, let's actually take a
look at what would happen if I were to lose some data.
So here's my picture.
Here's my picture of the haboob.
And let's say hold down Shift and I delete this file just
because I don't think I want it anymore.
And then I realize, oops, I deleted the wrong picture.
So--
as if there's more than one there.
Anyway, now I need to restore it.
So that's really pretty easy.
One thing you could do is to restore all users' files.
And that does just that.
You can see here in the UI here that you can just click
Browse for Files or Browse for Folders and that's
quite easy to do.
Now the reason why that's significant there, though, is
that notice the shield icon there.
That's behind all of these, actually.
Next to a lot of these.
In order to restore other users' files, you have to be
an administrator.
And since I am one, it does allow me to browse through all
the backup resources and restore just about anything.
I can also another backup to restore files from.
Sometimes you might backup to your regular harddrive.
Maybe it's an external or internal harddrive.
And then, at other times, you might backup-- at least on a
one off basis-- maybe to a network resource.
And so you could just select another backup.
And then you could go here or you could browse for the
network location that you chose.
Something like that.
Here in this case, I'm going to go ahead and
just restore my files.
And I'm going to browse for my files.
And it's going to be in my backup of C, the users, the
trainer accounts.
And let me go down to My Pictures.
And there's a picture of a haboob.
Actually, I renamed it previously.
So that's the name of it.
That's the actual picture right there, though.
So click on Add Files.
That's pretty much it.
Next.
And it couldn't be much easier.
You just restore it to the original location or to a
following location.
That might be useful also if you have two
versions of a file.
You have the one that's in the folder currently and you want
to restore one from a backup, but you're not sure which one
is the better version of the file.
In that case, I might just restore it to the desktop or
something like that.
But in my case, as you can see again here-- let
me go back to it.
We can see that in the pictures, there's nothing
there right now.
So I'll just move this off to the side.
And I'm going to restore that file to the original location.
We can see there, indeed, is my haboob picture.
So we got that back.
That's how a file gets restored.
Now here we are on this screen.
What in the world happened?
I just restarted the computer and I used the System Recovery
disk to boot from.
And, of course, when you boot from that you may have to
adjust your BIOS settings or there might be a keyboard
combination you can press, something like F2 or F12 or
something like that, that will allow you to boot to the
recovery disk.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and choose to use the keyboard
layout for the US.
And then you can click Continue and just boot on
into Windows 8.
You can also troubleshoot the computer or turn it off.
Obviously, if you're interested in recovering an
image, then you would troubleshoot the computer.
And then you could refresh your PC, which we'll talk
about in a future Nugget.
Or reset your PC, which we'll also talk about in a future
Nugget, which I think I'm probably going to name System
Recovery Options.
And then, also, there's Advanced Option.
This is where we would do our system image recovery.
Notice that there's also a System Restore.
Now what is this about?
System Restore will simply restore certain system
settings such as system files that are part of the operating
system, and also registry settings, back to a previous
point in time.
Sometimes, for example, when you install applications, or
maybe a malware has kind of messed up your computer or
something like that, if you know there's a point in the
past where everything was fine before those problems
occurred, you could go to System Restore to go back to
one of those previous points in time.
I'm just going to go there.
Windows 8, for example.
Here it's going to give me a wizard.
And I can go to a restore point made from one of these
points previous in time.
So maybe I know that my system was running just fine there.
I would choose that particular option then.
Now, let me give back out of here and go back to where we
were earlier.
As we go into troubleshooting things--
and, again, in our advanced options--
I can also go over here to a Command prompt.
And that would be the case if I had command line tools that
I knew were necessary in order to fix this computer.
That's the problem that I'm running in to, for example.
I could also do Automatic Repair, which just going to go
through a series of steps that Windows will address to see if
it can fix the computer for you automatically.
It'll do things such as look at the boot environment, make
sure all the boot files are there, make sure that there's
nothing corrupt in the boot configuration data.
And, if necessary, it'll also prompt you go back to System
Restore and choose a previous System Restore.
Now, in our case, we're looking at the system image
recovery for Windows 8.
And remember, in my backup I did have a previous backup
image made in my normal backup.
So there's an image in this backup.
I'm going to go ahead and click on Next.
And then I could also format and repartition disks.
I don't really need to do that in my case.
But certainly that might be the case if you're replacing a
bad drive with a good one or with another disk drive that
maybe it had previous partitions on it from another
project or something and you didn't want to wipe
all that stuff out.
In any case, you may also need to install drivers.
This would be the case if you had something such as a--
maybe a SCSI interface or some kind of a disk controller that
required drivers in order for Windows to be able to see it.
You could also go to Advanced here to automatically restart
the computer or option that or to option Check and Update
Disk Error Information.
I'm not going to do that one because that takes a little
bit more time.
So I'm going to leave that option off in my case.
And click on Next.
And that's pretty much it.
At this point, I'm just going to click on Finish.
And after a while, we'll see that my image has been-- by my
computer has been a reimaged, and that'll be the end of it.
I should then restart.
And it will be pretty much the same as if we never had a
problem in the first place.
And then while this is restoring the data, it
occurred to me I want to show you something
else here as well.
And this is a tangent, which I'm not sure how long this
will be relevant.
But you see here I'm on a Windows 8.1 computer.
If I go into the same settings over here in Control Panel
under System and Security and then back again down to File
History, notice that now there is no Windows 7 recovery
options down here.
This seems to have been completely deprecated in the
next build of Windows 8.1.
So these exam objectives that I showed you earlier over
here, we don't know how long they're
actually going to be relative.
Because these are all, actually, Windows 7 functions.
But, at least the time being, you do need to know how to use
those Windows 7 backup tools.
After the restore process applies the image, it then
reboots the computer.
Then we see that we also have the data here.
I've already logged in, as you can see.
So we're pretty much just back in business.
You can probably tell by the wallpaper here that I'm now on
a Windows 7 computer.
And I don't plan to stay here for very long.
But I want to show you something that is now, again,
transitioned off of Windows 7 and onto Windows 8 in a newer
kind of a technology.
And first of all, let's take a look at what we've got.
Remember, under Windows 7 you can have
previous versions of files.
For example, this video clip that I created here, maybe
that's not the one I wanted.
I wanted one that was created previous to this one.
And I can right-click on it and choose
Restore Previous Versions.
And you may recall seeing this kind of thing.
I don't really have any previous versions of this
particular one.
But if I did, I could select that and it would show me the
date and time that was created.
And I could also even preview those if I wanted to to make
sure that it was the file that I wanted.
So we've always had that, at least for the past few
versions of Windows.
The way we've configured that setting in Windows 7 and
previous versions is under System Protection.
And when you go into System Protection, you'll notice here
that we could go to configure.
And then down here, notice that now the system protection
for C will restore system settings.
And again, that's going to be registry settings and system
files and previous versions of files.
So periodically, it'll just keep track of any
changes to the files.
It'll take kind of a snapshot of it.
It's always been done under the Volume Shadow Copy Service
previously.
Now, I'll show you this because I want to point out
that this is no longer the case now under Windows 8.
Under Windows 8, we now use File History instead.
Now the way File History works is simply that you have to
have storage available to store your file history.
It'll store all the files pretty much forever until it
runs out of space.
So you do have to bear that in mind.
But all I have to do is to turn it on.
And we turn it on for the first time.
You also have to specify which disk you wanted to use.
The other thing we could do here as well is we could
choose to select a specific drive if that's not the one we
want or we don't want that one anymore.
Notice that we can also add a network location, which might
be very handy maybe a small office where you could kind of
centralize everyone's file history onto
a file server somewhere.
So that's kind of handy.
Also, what we could do here is we could exclude folders.
Now what's critical about this?
Notice that there's no include folders.
Yeah.
What this is going to backup is contacts, your desktop,
your favorites, and then it'll also back up the following
libraries--
Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos.
That's it.
If you have a specific folder that's outside of your
library, for example--
Maybe, maybe C:/MyFavoriteFiles--
it's not going to back that up.
There's no way to say add that in here.
When you click Add Here, it only excludes items.
It only excludes locations.
So it's a little bit inflexible in that respect.
But if you really want something to be included, I
guess the only thing you really need to do would be to
go to your library properties, for example for Documents, and
add that folder to that library.
And it would then be included.
Now let's also take a look here at the Advanced Settings.
And for this, you can just specify how often you want it
to be able to back things up.
For demonstration purposes I'll just make
mine, say, 10 minutes.
And then we'll also say the size of the offline cache.
Wait a minute.
What in the world is this about?
Well, remember we have offline files capability so that when
we're disconnected from network files, we can still
access them if we make them available offline.
And what this will do is it will even cache offline files
so that if we're disconnected from the server and we want to
restore a previous version of a file, for example, well, we
can do that now because it's caching part of our offline
file cache there.
Also, it's going to keep saved versions by default forever.
But you can also specify until space is needed.
That might be the case if you have smaller storage.
And if this is the case, it's going to be on a FIFO basis--
first in, first out basis.
And you see some of the other options that are available
down there as well.
Likewise, if you want to keep that forever but you are
starting to run low on space and you don't want to change
this setting, you could clean up versions.
And you could say clean up anything older than a year or
a month or whatever it is.
And that would also help to free up some space for you.
Notice there's also a setting for Home Groups here.
I don't really have that now because I'm
a member of a domain.
But if you're in a Home Group, you could also make this
available for other users in your Home Group.
And that way you don't have to have, say, an external or a
backup harddrive for each individual user.
You can just have maybe one larger harddrive attached to
one computer than everybody else can also use.
So I went ahead and made another backup just for good
measure here.
And I want to just show you some photographs that maybe I
want to make sure that I don't get rid of any of these or
don't lose any of these.
These are, again, from what I was in Utah
earlier this summer.
So anyway, I got a couple of these that are really
important to me.
I took a lot of work to get them and I had to go to kind
of remote areas.
Sure don't want to lose these.
So I'm going to close that up.
And let's say that I accidentally delete, oh, how
about this picture right here of this old car.
So I'm going to right-click here and choose Shift delete
so that it doesn't even go into the Recycle Bin.
And now, oops, I've lost it.
How do I get this back?
A couple of different ways you can go.
You can use the ribbon here so that I can click on Home.
And notice there's a History button now.
I can go to that, and it will show me my backups.
And I can go to this one or there was another one was made
previously.
I can scroll over here to the left.
I didn't have many pictures in there at that time, so I guess
better stick with this one.
And there's my car.
All I have to do is click on the big green button to
restore it to its original location.
And what do know, but there's my car picture
recovered quite nicely.
Now let me go ahead and close this and just show you the
other way to do this.
Let me also delete this one right here on the end.
Oops, I put that in Recycle so let me empty it.
The other thing I could do here would be to go directly
to, again, Offline Files.
And then I could just choose to Restore Personal Files.
And then, again, it brings this up.
And now I would have to browse for the appropriate location
through this interface.
And then I could select the file that I want once again,
and then I could restore it.
Now, notice this.
When I click the green button it just restores it to its
original location.
If that's not what I want, I could restore this to a
different location.
And when I do that, it will then give me an opportunity to
browse for the location I want.
Now notice that, indeed, I do have that file here on my
desktop as I specified.
Before we conclude here, I just want to
make something clear.
Just in case you think I'm a bad father for losing all of
our kids' pictures--
something my wife probably has thought many
times over the years--
I have been able to scavenge together a few of
them through Facebook.
Here's one of the pictures-- actually, let
me paste it in here--
one of the pictures from a friend of ours.
These aren't all my kids, by the way.
Three of them are my kids.
And the rest of are their compadres at the time and a
couple of them have been married since then.
Not at that age, but now that they're all grown up.
Gee, this gets more awkward as I talk about it, so let me
close that up and finish up here.
In this Nugget, we discussed configuring
backup and file recovery.
I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd
like to thank you for viewing.