I must confess that I have not been backing up my workstation on a regular basis. Initially my problem was the lack of attached disk space. After reviewing what I would recommend to clients I decided that I should follow my own recommendations and start backing up my workstation on a daily basis. Now this is not as bad as it sounds. Almost all of my data resides on the server and it is backed up on a daily basis. In addition I have Volume Shadow copy enabled so I have access to previous versions for this data. I do not keep much data on my workstation. I think I would use this backup to help me recover from a workstation disk failure and really bad software installation failures.
Recently I have been playing with Cobian Backup 7 as a replacement for NTBackup. It is free and it runs as a service. I found it pretty easy to setup but pretty difficult for me to get my data out of the zipped archive. The problem is that the zip archive is about 5 GB and it gave me corruption errors with 7-zip even though 7-zip supports zip64. Explorer had more serious problems with the archive since it did not support zip64. So my next step would be to create an uncompressed archive and this puts me back into the disk space issue.
So I have now gone back to Ntbackup. I like that Ntbackup uses shadow copies on XP. After I get a full backup, I will see how long it will take me to compress the file.
I finally figured out how to send the latest backup log file as the message body in an email. I guess I am too lazy to open attachments. To keep the message body from displaying some funky characters from the log file, I used the “TYPE” command to display the file contents and piped this output directly into blat. I use the task scheduler to run this early in the morning so it will be waiting in my inbox as a scheduled task.