If you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, there will be an additional selection here to choose a network share and enter the necessary credentials to access it. Your options are any local disk, USB disk, or CD/DVD. On the Control Panel applet screen, choose Set up backup.įirst you will be prompted as to where to save your backups. Go to the Control Panel, then choose System and Security, and select Backup and Restore. That being said, it’s a great place to start for anyone who wants to back up to an internal or external drive for file and system protection. It also can’t backup files that are on a network share. The biggest issue with Windows 7’s built-in Backup and Restore is its inability to backup files and images to a network share for Starter and Home Premium – the two versions most people have. It does allow incremental backups and versioning though. Unlike more sophisticated backup software, it doesn’t leverage the system level backups for file level restores, meaning it is going to take up more space than a backup solution which does just system level. Windows 7 also has a built-in feature called Previous Versions, which will leverage both Windows Backups as well as restore points in order to allow you to restore files to a different point in time.īackup and Restore, when configured to perform both file and system level backups, will actually perform both a file level, and a system level backup. Backup and Restore allows both file level, and image level backups. If you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, Backup and Restore will also allow you to perform backups to a network share. Windows 7 includes a built-in utility called Backup and Restore (formerly Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista) which allows you to perform backups to internal or external disks on your local PC.

If your budget is low, the bare minimum that you want to do is at least back up your files and system image to an internal or external drive, or a network share. These offer both image based backups, as well as file based backups.

The first method of performing backups is to use the built-in backup tools in Windows 7, 8.1, or OS X.

Fbackup 7