JamieMac,

"If" you have important stuff you cannot afford to lose the best option
is to buy a system like Acronis True Image. There are others, a company
call 7-tools make one I think and you can search on Google but many here
know and trust Acronis.

That allows you to make a master backup and then do incremental backups
that simply record changes - you do not have to keep saving the whole
thing. You can also make a clone of your drive so for example you
install Windows fresh and save the clone copy - any time you have
trouble you can get back to that starting point.

You can also use a removable drive, or send to a networked computer etc.

For things like pictures and documents simply copy them to a DVD or CDs
once a week / month / whatever, it never hurts to have more than one
copy - hard drives DO fail from time to time and if you only have one
than keeping a full backup or clone on that same drive is good but
certainly not perfect, two drives is a better answer - and just because
you have two partitions (say C and D) may not help if they are on the
same drive.

I would NEVER rely on the built in backup functions on any Windows
system, you can hit permissions trouble and all kinds of things, and
this may not matter if you only have passive files like docs and
pictures or music etc and are prepared to reinstall the OS but if you
get OS trouble you can't expect the OS to rescue itself.


JamieMac wrote:[color=blue]
> Thanks Andre for your reply.
>
> To confirm i understand this correctly. There should on ever be one copy of
> my Laptop back up. If I am seeing other copies then I should delete them.
> The vista backup (on premium) does not save older copies?
>
> Thanks,
>
> "Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]" wrote:
>[color=green]
>> Delete the existing backups and Backup again. The purpose of backups is to
>> have a current up to date copy of your data.
>> --
>> Andre
>> Blog: [url]http://adacosta.spaces.live.com[/url]
>> My Vista Quickstart Guide:
>> [url]http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!9709.entry[/url]
>> "JamieMac" <JamieMac@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
>> news:811595EC-AF32-4A31-8D59-3194AA5078B8@microsoft.com...[color=darkred]
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Probably a simple problem but man is it frustrating me!
>>> I have a Vista Premium on a laptop and I have set a nightly back up of
>>> most
>>> of my file types to my D: drive. Problem is that after about 5 days it
>>> says
>>> its full.
>>>
>>> Now I woul dhave thought there should be a way to do a sort of rolling
>>> back
>>> up so that it keeps say a few days worth and then overwrites older backups
>>> thus not filling up the drive and then refusing to do any more backups?
>>>
>>> Any help MUCH appreciated. It seemed so simple?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Jamie[/color]
>>
>>[/color][/color]