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Lesson 4: Changing Windows Default Backup Options

Windows Backup allows you to change the default settings for all backup and restore jobs. These default settings are on the tabs in the Options dialog box. To access the Options dialog box, in Windows Backup, on the Tools menu, you click Options.

After this lesson, you will be able to

• Explain how to change the default options for Windows Backup.

Estimated lesson time: 5 minutes

This list provides an overview of the default options for Windows Backup:

• General tab. These settings affect data verification, the status information for backup and restore jobs, alert messages, and what is backed up. (See Figure 19.5.) You should select the Verify Data After The Backup Completes check box because it is critical that your backup data is not corrupt.
• Restore tab. These settings affect what happens when the file to restore is identical to an existing file.
• Backup Type tab. These settings affect the default backup type when you perform a backup job. The options you select depend on how often you back up, how quickly you want to restore, and how much storage space you have.
• Backup Log tab. These settings affect the amount of information that is included in the backup log.
• Exclude Files tab. These settings affect which files are excluded from backup jobs.

You can modify some default settings in Backup Wizard for a specific backup job. For example, the default backup type is normal, but you can change it to another backup type in Backup Wizard. However, the next time that you run Backup Wizard, the default backup type (normal) is selected.

Figure 19.5 The General tab of the Options dialog box for Windows Backup

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, you learned about the default Windows Backup options and how to change them using the tabs in the Options dialog box for Windows Backup. You also learned that you can change the default settings for individual jobs.