| ??? 04/04/08 20:13 Read: times |
#152971 - You may be a bit off-base with this notion Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Craig Steiner said:
Richard Erlacher said:
The key is to use a utility that copies, bit for bit, the hard disk to the backup medium, not file-by-file, but bit for bit, warts and all. That way, the OS is preserved, along with everything else, so you don't have to go through all the tedious install processes to restore. I personally disagree. Problems that require a restore from backup are seldom enough that, Windows being what it is, having to restore a backup is probably as good a time as any to re-install the OS from scratch and start truly clean. Restoring a backup of the entire HD (including OS) is just going to restore any of the other nonsense that's built up over the months or years; it might even restore a virus that was inadvertently "backed up" with the OS and hasn't been detected. The matter of an undetected virus being "scooped up" in a backup is no worse than not having had the failure that caused one to restore in the first place. Normally, all one needs is to "get back to" where one was before the catastrophic failure. If you didn't know about the virus before the backup, you won't know about it after the restore either. No matter what you do, if there's a virus that's crawling around your hard drive, it will still be there after a restore, but if it didn't bother you, yet it won't do it after the restore either, at least not immediately. No, if I really suffer a catastrophic incident that requires I restore everything from backup, I definitely take the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Sure, I guess that means my "incident" will take me a day to recover from rather than an hour or two. But it's not like it happens on a regular basis so I still think it's a good opportunity to get a clean system. Let there at least be some benefit obtained from the incident. When I buy a "spare" hard disk drive, I don't buy one spare, I buy them a half-dozen at a time, so I can put 'em in swappable trays. That way, if I want, I can dupe a disk and then simply deal with the data files, if that's appropriate. Bit-by-bit backups are quick, easy, and fully automatic. Unfortunately, M$ doesn't like 'em, so you can't get 'em for Vista or XP. If you need to do "cleanup" it should be part of the maintenance regimen anyway, and should not wait for a catastrophic failure. It's like the software guys ... they like their work product to consume as much memory and hard disk space as is available, and even if it could fit in an 8KB EEPROM, they don't feel their job is done until it consumes 2 GB or RAM and 2 TB of HDD space. The way in which this happens is they say, "Well, it's there, so there's no need to conserve it." (sound familiar?) Another problem with backing up the whole OS and just restoring it, bit by bit, is that (with Windows) that pretty much means you have to restore it to the same computer with the same peripherals. Even if Windows product activation is not an issue, the drivers from one computer will most likely be completely wrong for that of another. The last thing I would do is restore a bit-by-bit backup from a laptop to any other model laptop or a desktop. By just backing up my data I'm completely portable and can restore to any machine that has my required applications. In fact, I'd restore my data to another computer and be working on that computer while I rebuild my other machine in parallel. Setting up new machines isn't the task at hand. It's getting the work, which was interrupted by the failure of that ^%$#@! HDD that just went up in smoke, done that's important. You can pay for three computers with the time lost in fooling with reinstallation of software. Isn't it bad enough that the work done since the last daily full backup has been lost? So unless you buy two laptops every time you buy one (i.e. one to use and one as your backup to which you can restore to in an emergency), I don't see much benefit in backing up the whole OS and installed programs. The advantage lies in that, when a catastrophic failure occurs, you can start the restore process, go away, and, when it's over, pick up where you were right after the last backup. Now, if your backup was a file-by-file type, that might work, too, but who wants to sit around for an hour or two reinstalling and validating OS, and then spoon-feed it the various applications, e.g. MSOffice, with its' various configuration demands, device-specific drivers for your peripherals, etc, and all those DVD-based applications that took 2-3 hours each to install and validate? Regards,
Craig Steiner Now you can see why I've gone back to using Windows v3.1x and DOS for much of my "serious" work. The DOS setup is fully backup capable, and, if I'm careful to degauss any fd's that are used to transfer files to local-network-attached systems, I needn't worry about introducing "critters" to the setup. What I've got ot decide is whether I want to use a non-Intel-processor-based (ARM) machine running LINUX as a gateway to the backup, so common virus infections won't be a problem there. RE |
