Vista Backup and Restore Center

The Vista Backup and Restore Center takes the confusion and fear out of System Restore. With Vista, you can now backup and restore your important system files with ease. In Windows XP, System Restore was a confusing system that most people ignored. Common questions were "Am I going to lose my pictures? Am I going to lose my data?" Microsoft took that uncertainty and created the Backup and Restore Center.

Backing Up Your Data

At the top of the Backup Center, you'll find a section for backing up your data. You can choose to backup individual files or the entire drive volume. The wizard will now allow you to even select the type of media you want to save the backups to, such as DVD, External Hard Drive, USB Drive and CDR. Backup existed in previous versions of Windows, but was hidden under numerous layers of confusing menus.

Using System Restore

Vista now automatically makes restore points whenever a there is a major change to your system. You no longer have to worry about going into restore to manually take a snapshot whenever you update drivers or install hardware. Vista does this for you.

You can restore your system files anytime, without fear of losing data, such as pictures and documents. The restore section is located just below the backup area in the Backup and Restore center.

Previous Versions

A related utility to the restore and backup features is Previous Versions. This is an on the fly system that allows to quickly revert a document to its previous state. For instance, if you were working on a document and accidentally deleted an entire page, you can go into the Previous Versions section and revert the document back to the time before the page was deleted. Being able to restore files in this matter is a huge innovation with Windows backup.