Windows 7 Media Center is a great way to keep your entertainment system organized and running smoothly. However, if something goes wrong and you lose your settings or data, you may have to start over from scratch. mcBackup is a great tool for backing up your Windows 7 Media Center settings. mcBackup is a free software application that can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. After installation, it will open up a window that looks like this: The first thing you need to do is create an account if you don’t have one already. Once you have an account, click on the “Create Account” button in the top left corner of the window. Once you have created an account, click on the “Create Backup” button in the bottom left corner of the window. This will take you to a new screen: You will need to choose which media center settings you want to backup. The first thing we’ll backup are our desktop environment and applications preferences: Next we’ll backup our configuration files for our media center: We’ll also backup our user profiles and passwords: Finally, we’ll back up our entire computer:

mcBackup 3.0 for Windows 7

This handy utility will backup WMC scheduled recordings,channel lineups, and Recoded TV . The current version is currently a Beta and is only designed to work with Windows 7 Media Center and does work with extenders.

There are versions for 32 & 64-bit systems so download and install the one which is right for your system (links below). Make sure you’re closed out of WMC and run through the installer as normal accepting the defaults.

 

After you have it installed you can access it from the Start Menu under TheDigitalLifestyle.com folder.

The first time you launch it you’ll see the backup service is off by default.

Just click on the link to start it up.

Under the Backup and Restore Now tab you can select what to backup and start the process right away or if you’ve already created backups you can restore them here as well.

Under the Backup Location tab you can select where you want to store certain items.

If you backup Recorded TV it’s a good idea to back it up to a location with plenty of storage since the files can be large.

Note: tried to backup to Windows Home Server, but it didn’t seem to support network locations.

However we were able to backup to an external USB drive.

Under the Schedule tab you can select the days and time you want to backup WMC.

After you create a schedule make sure to apply your settings and close out of the app UI. It will run quietly in the background and do it’s job.

When you start a backup, nothing exciting happens, you’ll see that the backup as started in the lower left corner of the app.

You won’t get a “backup successful” message…however, when you launch mcBackup it displays the date and time of the last successful backup.

Restore a Backup

To restore a backup go to the Backup and Restore Now tab, select what you want to restore, and click the Restore Now button.

You’ll see a Command Prompt window open while it loads the backups.

Then a message letting you know the tuner has been restored.

The project is still in beta, but it looks like there are some new features that will be available soon.

If you are a HTPC enthusiast or just enjoy using Windows 7 Media Center for you’re TV viewing, mcBackup 3.0 is a cool utility to have to backup and restore your Recorded TV and other WMC settings. Again it’s still in Beta so you might experience a few quirks here and there. But overall it seemed to work pretty good and since it’s still a work in progress we would expect it to get better and have more new features.

Download mcBackup 64-bit

Download mcBackup 32-bit