It's not enough to perform the maintenance tasks in this course once -- you have to keep at it constantly to ensure your system is functioning to its full potential. In this final lesson, you'll learn how to create and implement a maintenance schedule using the Task Scheduler, and how to create management consoles that run maintenance tasks on your own computer or on a remote one on your network.

Let's kick this lesson off by making a list of all the maintenance you want to do and how often (and exactly when) to do it. Then later you'll use this information to schedule the tasks.

Creating a Backup Schedule

You should back up your important data files every day, at least the ones that have changed. You can do this manually or with a Backup utility, as you learned in Lesson 1.

Understanding Backup Types

There are three types of backups you can do, in various combinations, to create your backup schedule:

• Full: Every time you back up, you back up all the files in the set. For example, you would back up the entire contents of your My Documents folder.
• Incremental: Once a week you make a full backup, and then on other days you just back up the files that changed that day. You must keep your most recent full backup, along with the disks for each day. When the end of the week rolls around, you make another full backup and discard or overwrite the incremental backup disks.
• Differential: Once a week you make a full backup, and then on other days, you back up whatever has changed since that full backup. Each day's backup set is larger with differential, but you have to keep track of only two disks: the full one and the most recent differential one.

So how does the program know which files have changed and which haven't? It uses the archive attribute (sometimes called an archive flag) for each file. Every file has an archive attribute, which is either on or off. When you back up a file, the backup program turns off the Archive attribute for that file to indicate that it's been backed up. When you modify a file, the operating system sets the file's Archive attribute to On, indicating it's been changed since the backup.

To see this for yourself, right-click any file and select Properties. On the General tab is an Archive checkbox. You can manually set the archive flag yourself by marking or clearing this checkbox, as shown in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1: A file's archive attribute tells a backup utility whether it has changed.

If the Properties box for the file doesn't look like the one in Figure 6-1, specifically, if it has an Advanced button instead of an Archive checkbox, click the Advanced button to open an Advanced Attributes dialog box, and in that box, check or clear the File is ready for archiving checkbox. It's the same thing, just a different way of accessing it. (The difference is the file system; Figure 6-1 shows a file on a disk that uses the FAT32 system, and the Advanced button appears for files on a disk that uses the NTFS file system.)

In Microsoft Backup, the archive attribute is cleared for a file when you back it up with a Full or Incremental backup, but not a Differential backup. Why? If you do an incremental backup, that means that the next day you do another incremental backup. Only the files that have changed since the current day's backup are included in the next day's set -- they're the ones that have changed (and therefore have the archive attribute set to On). On the other hand, if you do a differential backup, to back up the files that have changed since the last full backup, you do not want the archive attribute to change for the files because you want them to be backed-up again the next day.

Performing a Scheduled Backup with Microsoft Backup

As an experiment, follow these steps to set the backup type for a specific backup job. You can do a backup or you can cancel in the last step.

1. Select Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.
2. Click the Advanced mode hyperlink.
3. Click the Backup tab.
4. Select the folder(s) to back up.
5. (Optional) To change the default backup type, select Tools > Options, click the Backup Type tab, and then select the backup type that should be the default (Normal, Copy, Incremental, Differential, or Daily.) Click OK.

Normal is what Microsoft Backup calls Full. Copy makes a full backup but does not mark the files as having been backed up. Daily selects only the files that were changed that day.

6. Click Start Backup. The Backup Job Information dialog box opens.
7. Click the Advanced button. The Advanced Backup Options dialog box opens, shown in Figure 6-2.

Figure 6-2: Advanced Backup Options dialog box.

8. Select the desired backup type for this job only from the Backup Type list.
9. Click OK.
10. Click Start Backup.

Remembering to Back Up

The challenge in any backup schedule is to remember to do it. If you use a Backup utility such as Microsoft Backup, you can schedule the backup program to start at a certain time automatically through the Windows Task Scheduler, covered later in this lesson.

If you do it manually, you need to figure out a way to remember. One way is to set an alarm or reminder for yourself in a program, such as Microsoft Outlook, that has a calendar in it. Another way is to schedule some dummy task to occur using the Windows Task Scheduler, such as the Calculator program opening, and then just remember that whenever you see that program run, it's time for a backup.