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backup

The creation of a copy of programs or data on the computer as a protection against some type of disaster. Windows XP provides a backup application containing a wizard for facilitating the creation of backups.

backup type

A backup method that determines which data is backed up and how. Windows XP provides five backup types: normal, differential, incremental, daily, and copy.

Basic Input/Output System (BIOS)

The firmware application encoded in a computer that initializes the computer before the operating system is loaded. The BIOS manages basic hardware configuration.

basic disk

A disk partitioning scheme that uses partition tables supported by DOS and many other operating systems, containing primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives.