Using Windows 7 Backup and Library features

This screencast video shows you the difference between XP and Windows 7 when it comes to making backups and using its Libraries features to access your files on your hard drive.

Hello and Welcome! I’m David Strom, your host and reviewer. Today, we’ll look at the differences between Vista and Windows 7 libraries and backup restore features. In Vista, we pretty much have the same setup for organizing our files and folders as we did in XP. Here we are looking at the Windows Explorer view of our documents, it wasn’t very useful, as a result, many of us would store our data all over our hard drive in special data folders or even inside program folders. Microsoft just tried to make things easier in Windows 7 by allowing you to collect all of your files into a library no matter where they’re located, even across the network or removable hard drives. Think of the library as a Meta folder. Libraries can show files and folders we don’t actually store anything inside, it’s more of an organizational tool to monitor or index your data. And as you can see here, you can share them across your workgroup to make it easier for your colleagues to find stuff too. Let’s move on to making backups. Vista’s backup was pretty much ‘all or nothing’, users could backup individual files or an entire hard drive. It also had very confusing stream that you see here, it was almost never used by anyone no matter how skilled. Windows 7 is a bit more useful, and you can see from this screen, you can let Windows choose the most important files or you can pick a collection of files including particular parts of the library and user specific data as you navigate down the menu tree and expand the various entries. The only hard part is finding the utility which is inside the system and security center in your control panel. Finally, Windows 7 will include a system image backup on any drive that’s formatted with NTFS which includes registry settings, all of your installed programs and machine drivers. Windows 7 also gives a more complete picture of ‘how much space you’ll need for your backup and what free space you have remaining on your drive’, a nice touch. Thanks for watching this screen cast, you can find more videos and Windows 7 resources at our website.