Backup and Recover in Windows 7?

In the past i simply manually backed up my stuff. copying the my music, my pictures, my documents, etc folders onto an external harddrive.

windows 7 gave me a little popup prompting me to do scheduled backups, which i figured was great, one less thing for me to have to do...so i run the program and after telling me its backing up the files i normally would, at like 50% on the progress bar it says theres not enough room on my external harddrive, but i still have 90 gigs free...

im left with just two files, mediaID.bin (1kb) and Justin-PC (says 0 bytes but theres like 70gigs missing on the harddrive i backed it up to...)

so what happened? did it finish backing up the files, but not have enough to write a ghost image or something? are all my files in the Justin-PC file? I'm a little uncomfortable not being able to browse it to make sure it contains all the things i want backed up, seeing how backing up is supposed to give you peice of mind being able to know all your files are there...is there any way to check it?

 

Simple, Win7 first grabs all your files and compresses everything... then at about 50% as you saw, it creates some data files, used to identify the back and class it, and transfer everything... however the file transfer failed, because you are out of space. Why didn't tell you this before is starts the process? simple, because it's kinda hard (read near impossible to be accurate) to estimate how big a compress file will be if you have no idea of the files you are about to encounter.

 

thats the weird thing though, i still had 90 gigs free when it said it was out of space! it shouldnt need 160GB to backup my files, especially if its compressing them... can someone give me a link or maybe take a screenshot of what the back up should look like when its done?

 

Windows 7 RC.

Inside Lappy7-PC, you have a of some folder with contains, more folders, and inside these last set of folders, you have a bunch of Zip file.

 

ok here is what I've got...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v39/killjoy1443/backup.jpg

the reason i couldnt get it to complete before by the way, was that after it was backing up my libraries it was trying to make a copy of the entire c: drive, which of course wasnt going to fit. i unchecked that and it completed with a couple hundred gigs to spare.

problem is im still not seeing what you have. the file shows up as 0 bytes, but like you can see its listed as 88 gigs on disk. when i double click it it says "choose an option below for the selected backup" with 3 options, none of which are to let me simply explore the thing. when i click properties it displays that it contains 0 files, 0 folders, and 0 bytes... what gives?

 

To browse this folder... you need to right click on the folder with the backup/restore icon and select "Open".