Configuring Windows 7 (Training Kit) - Part 77. This training kit is designed for IT professionals who operate in enterprise enviroments that use Windows 7 as a desktop operating system. You should have at least one year of experience in the IT field, as well as experience implementing and administering any Windows client operating system in a networked environment. | WARNING STORING BACKUPS ON A DISK VOLUME Do not store your backups on a separate partition on a single hard drive on your computer. If you lose the hard drive due to hardware failure or because it needs to be wiped after a virus attack you also lose your backup. An external hard drive External hard drives are more expensive to purchase than internal hard drives although you need to balance this against the cost of fitting the internal drive. They can be removed and stored in a secure location. However they are typically slower than internal hard drives and tend to be less reliable mainly because they are by default formatted using FAT rather than NTFS. You cannot use an external hard drive for a System Image backup unless you convert its filing system to NTFS. Because it is easily removable it is more likely that an external hard drive will be missing when a scheduled backup is required. DVD-ROM Optical disks are inexpensive and can be archived in a secure location. You can back up to both CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs but in practice a typical backup would need a large number of CD-ROMs. You probably need a number of DVD-ROMs. You cannot save scheduled System Image backups on DVD-ROMs. DVD-ROMs can become corrupted over time but the timeframe for this is a number of years. USB flash drives Flash drive memory is considerably less expensive and flash drive devices support much more memory than they did three or even two years ago. Nevertheless they typically support a lot less memory than hard drives and quickly fill up if you needed to keep copies of older backups. You cannot save System Image backups to flash memory. A flash drive must be able to hold more than 1 GB if you want to save a backup on it. Flash drives can be stored offsite and are small and easy to carry. They are also easy to lose. Network location If your computer is short of disk space you can back it up to a network location on another computer or network storage. Note that this is not the same as the .
