[bobroosth]

Vista Home Premium. Using Vista Backup, the external drive has filled up. I have been unable to find a way to tell Backup to limit either the number of backup files or the age. I can manually delete the older backup folders (actually zip files) but I worry about screwing up the catalog that Backup keeps.

Suggestions, other than purchasing a smarter program.

[fairnooks]

Is it a full backup each time? If so, you can delete the older backups and, depending on frequency, keep 3-10 of the most recent backups determined by the time stamp for each backup set.

Alternatively you could use a program like Syncback or SyncToy and just keep one set of all your files backed up (only new and altered files are added to the backup). The disadvantage is you have to set up the source and destination folders for the backup. Its not as automatic like the built in Vista backup tool once you've chosen which type of files to back up and the destination drive.

The Clickfree USB transformer device will search your system much like Vista backup will and automatically backup that data to any external drive. http://www.clickfree.com/products_transformer.php