Full Backup & Restore for Windows Vista

Question

I'm looking for a freeware or low cost application that will backup everything, including registry on Windows Vista Home Premium and to restore from a CDROM disk. The destination is an external hard drive on USB 2.0.

Searching on SuperUser and Stack Overflow show articles, but don't mention full backup of the registry and complete restore using CDROM.

I would also like to have compressed output and incremental backups. One article mentions CloneZilla, but their web page says that the incremental feature is not supported.

I am using Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 1.

I need to backup 200 GB onto a 230 GB drive and would like to have multiple backups (thus the need for compression).

Other requirements:

• Single file restore
• Quality is more important than performance.
• Application must run on Windows Vista.
• Extra: Run as daemon or background task on 4 user system.

Thanks

Answer 1

You're looking for a scheduled incremental backup, this feature is not included in Clonezilla for a very good reason. Clonezilla (and other programs like it) are being used to create a reliable emergency drive backup which should not be compromised. if you run such software automatically and unattended you might destroy a perfectly good drive image by overwriting it with an infected image.

You should create a drive image and then keep it somewhere safe and sound, after that, run scheduled incremental backups of the user data (that's where partitioning the drive comes in handy).