19 Dec
2011
19 Dec
'11
3:47 p.m.
At 04:07 PM 12/19/2011, Gene Buckle wrote:
I don't know about older editions, but Win7 has
this spiffy little "backup and recovery wizard" that not only backs up all your
goodies to an external device, network share, etc, but it also will burn a bootable DVD in
order to facilitate the recovery.
It depends on how you look at it. Unless you've restored to cold iron,
you only think you have backups.
You can't expect to take an image of one Windows machine and restore it on
different hardware, as would be the most likely case if a fire or tornado
destroyed your computer. You need to verify that your applications are
truly in concert with the backup software and that you are writing usable files.
With an external backup, you might be able to restore the user's personally-created
files. Windows itself, at the HAL level, doesn't like to be moved around.
Sometimes it might work on different hardware, but mostly not. Applications
aren't easily moved. The monolithic registry stands in the way. Licensing
mechanisms stand in the way, from Microsoft on down.
A proper Windows backup and restore strategy has to jump all these hurdles.
- John