Vista Back Up Files to a Writable CD or DVD

1. Place a blank writable CD R/RW (read/writable) or DVD R/RW in your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive and then choose Start➪Documents.

2. In the resulting Documents window, select all the files that you want to copy to disc.

3. Right-click the files that you want and then choose Send To➪Name of your writable CD-R/RW-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.

4. In the Burn a Disc dialog box that appears, enter a disc title and choose whether you wish to change the file format selection. Click Next.

5. In the window that appears, click Burn to Disc. When the files have been copied, click the Close button to close the CD-R/RW-ROM or DVD-ROM window.

If you want to back up the entire contents of a folder, such as the Document folder, you can just click the Documents folder itself in Step 2.

You can also back up to a network or another drive by using the Back Up Your Computer link in the Control Panel. Using Windows Backup, you can make settings to regularly back up to a local disk or CD R/RW/DVD drive, or to a network. Backing up to a CD/DVD is a little different from burning a disc in that after you back up your files, only changes are saved each subsequent time a backup is run.