CREATING AND RUNNING AN UNATTENDED BACKUP JOB

5. Why should you e-mail or send a console message to users before you begin abackup?

Lesson Summary

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Before beginning a backup, it is best to make sure that users have all files closed.If you are backing up to removable media, you might need to make sure that themedia is properly prepared to receive a backup.

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The Backup Utility allows you to back up everything on the computer; to specifyselected files, drives, or network data; or to back up only the System State data.

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The Backup Utility allows you to provide the target destination and the backupmedia or file name.

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The Backup Or Restore Wizard Advanced backup settings include the followingoptions: selecting the type of backup operation to perform, verifying data afterbackup, using hardware compression, and scheduling the backup to run at a latertime or to run at regularly scheduled times.

Lesson 3: Restoring Data

In this lesson, you learn about restoring data. The ability to restore corrupt or lost datais critical to all corporations and is the goal of all backup jobs. To ensure that you cansuccessfully restore data, you should follow certain guidelines, such as keeping thor-ough documentation on all of your backup jobs and performing test restores on a reg-ular basis.After this lesson, you will be able to

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Prepare to restore data

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Select backup sets, files, and folders to restore

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Specify advanced restore settingsEstimated lesson time: 30 minutes

How to Prepare to Restore Data

To restore data, you must select the backup sets, files, and folders to restore. You canalso specify additional settings based on your restore requirements. The Backup OrRestore Wizard helps you restore data.When critical data is lost, you need to restore it quickly. Use the following guidelinesto help prepare for restoring data:

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Base your restore strategy on the backup type that you used for the backup. Iftime is critical when you are restoring data, your restore strategy must ensure thatthe backup types that you choose for backups expedite the restore process. Forexample, use normal and differential backups so that you need to restore only thelast normal backup and the last differential backup. If you have a reasonably fastbackup device, you might want to perform daily normal backups so that you needto restore from only one backup set.

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Perform a trial restore periodically to verify that your backups are functioning cor-rectly. A trial restore can uncover hardware problems that do not show up withsoftware verifications. Restore the data to an alternate location, and then comparethe restored data with the data on the original hard disk.

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Keep documentation for each backup job. Create and print a detailed backup logfor each backup job, containing a record of all files and folders that were backedup. By using the backup log, you can quickly locate which piece of media con-tains the files that you need to restore without having to load the catalogs. A cat-alog is an index of the files and folders from a backup job that Windows XPProfessional automatically creates and stores with the backup job and on the com-puter running the Backup Utility.