Ian said:
I am trying for the first time to back up my machine. Each time the wizard
gets me as far as 'mounting the media' and then refuses with the message:
' back up can not be completed. Error while creating volume shadow
copy:80042301'
I've no idea what this means, being about 6 years old as far as computers
are concerned.
Thanks very much in advance for any advice as to how to continue.
What program are you using to backup and what media are you trying to
backup to? If ntbackup, it cannot backup natively to DVD or CD. It
will backup to a single CD (but not DVD) if packet writing software is
installed, but it will not span more than one CD. There are better
backup solutions.
One option is a drive imaging program. This makes an exact image of the
partition which can be saved on CD/DVD or to another drive - internal or
external - though it's best to save the backups to external media such
as a USB2 drive or to DVD. Restores can be done of the entire partition
or individual files / folders. These work well and make it easy to
recover from a drive crash. Examples of this are:
Norton Ghost 9.0
Acronis True Image
BootItNg
The second option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's
Backup My PC. This is an excellent tool. It is the evolution of
ntbackup. There are other good backup programs out there as well. This
can do a complete backup or backup individual files and folders to
DVD/CD and other drives.
