Bare Metal Disaster Recovery for Windows Vista Home
Windows Vista Home doesn’t come with the Complete PC Backup feature found in the Business and Ultimate editions.
The good news is you can use some freely available Microsoft tools to perform regular scheduled backups of your complete PC that can be restored onto ‘bare metal’ (e.g. a new hard disk to replace one that failed).
The backups are performed using two programs:
vshadow – performs a Volume Shadow Copy (or snapshot) of your hard disk
robocopy – “Robust File Copy”
The vshadow command takes a snapshot of your hard disk. The snapshot includes files that would not normally be accessible by programs, such as registry hives.
The robocopy command can be used to copy files from the snapshot to a backup directory (e.g. on an external hard disk). The options passed to robocopy ensure that metadata such as security descriptors and file times are copied along with the files.
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