Windows 7: Win backups only daily or weekly?

Short of third party software, is there any way - or has anyone come up with a hack - to get Windows to backup somewhere between daily and weekly? There are workarounds, but it'd be nice if Windows could do a backup every few days.

Hello Highstream,

If you like, you could setup and use Task Scheduler to run either shortcut below when you like for this. The shortcuts will actually create the backup.

Backup - Make a "Create New Backup" Shortcut

OR

Backup - Make a "Create Incremental Backup" Shortcut

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks. So one creates a backup schedule in Windows, say every Monday, runs the shortcut in between as desired, and the 'tweeners, whether full or incremental, are each saved in a separate folder? How does one restore from an incremental backup? Right now, I do full backups and occasional restores.

Correct, you could use your normal every Monday backup schedule as usual along with the one in Task Scheduler if you like.

The incremental backup shortcut basically just creates another one of your incremental backups that you already setup. This is the same as clicking on the Back up now button in "Backup and Restore" to manually create another backup of what you already had setup in the same Backup Set folder.

The create new backup shortcut will create a completely new full backup of what you already setup in "Backup and Restore" in a new Backup Set folder.

You would be able to restore these backups the same way as any other Windows Backup you created.

Restore Backup User and System Files

Install of the incremental shorcut was confusing. On the desktop, both files show in Properties as .vbs and one of them won't switch to the General tab because of the %System Root% designation. OTOH, in the desktop file their types look ok. I ended up extracting to another folder and then sending the .vbs over to C:\Windows. The link on the desktop, hence, shows as .lnk in the desktop folder, but as .vbs on the desktop itself (Properties). But the short cut works, at least to start. Many thanks.

You're most welcome.

Yeah, they the shortcuts are just .vbs (script files) files to use as a shortcut to run the backup. They aren't .lnk files like a normal shortcut.

Actually, there's a different and much easier and better way of doing this: Window's Task Scheduler (type schedule in Start). In Daily, one can choose every so many days, or in Weekly one can choose which days of the week. My sense is the task scheduler is less often mentioned in Win 7 than it was under XP.

That'll work as well unless you wanted to create a "new full backup" each time.

With your pointers, I set up a manually run incremental the other day and it ran fine. What came to mind since then was why can't I automate that. Looking at the task scheduler this morning, I noticed the Windows Backup Monitor with three entries, one of which is the Backup set up via the Control Panel, and that its schedule (trigger) could be modifed. I'm assuming it will continue to be an incremental. Just so when I need to restore, the latest is the one.

The default task for Windows Backup is for incremental backups.

You can automate incremental backups if you would like to turn on the schedule in Windows Backup for daily or weekly backups.

...or, you could do what was posted above to create your own tasks that will automatically run either VBS script on a schedule you wanted instead. Of course the computer must be running at the time you schedule the task to run for it to actually create the backup though.