I tried Windows 7 backup yesterday and it took over 5 hours to complete. When it did it used about 135GB of my backup drive which is okay, but when I looked a the backup drive, I found a couple directories that backup created. One had over 2000 .zip files in it. Is this how Custom backup works? I also had another folder with teh Image backup data. I decided I didn't like it so I deleted the backups, but now I would like to look at the log file. How do I do this? When I navigate to C:\Windows\Logs\WindowsBackup I see a WindowsBackup.2.etl file. When I double click on this I get the popup saying Windows 7 does not know what to do with this file. There is no way to look at the log from the Windows Backup window that I can see either. A Google search did not turn up anything useful.Rich

Hi Ztruker,Windows backup creates .zip files to store file backups and a VHD format to store image backups. Is there a reason why you are bothered with this format? To browse through the contents of the file backups, you could launch the restore files dialog and browse/search. To navigate through the image backup, you can mount the VHD through Disk Management. This is of course, if you have a backup. Unfortunately, backup does not create a user-readable log. The etl files are meant for product tracing in the case of failures and are for Microrosft use.Hope this helps. Thanks,Sneha[MSFT]

To open *.etl file, open Event Viewer, right-click Saved Logs, click Open Saved Log, and then locate to the *.etl file. Another way is using command tracerpt. Please refer the following article. TracerptArthur Xie - MSFT