Win 8.1 hassles

[jamiechi2]

The best tool for backup in my opinion is Macrium. ($45 us for home user)
They used to have a free version.
When I was employed at that company in Redmond (that shall not be named) we used third party tools to image and back up our drives in one of the test labs.
We found that the backup tools built into the os were not sufficient to do the job.

You need some kind of tool that has a bootable CD that runs independently of the OS.
I believe there are also Linux bootable discs that can be set up for free to do what Macrium does.

 

[johnwhelan]

The best tool for backup in my opinion is Macrium. ($45 us for home user)
They used to have a free version.
When I was employed at that company in Redmond (that shall not be named) we used third party tools to image and back up our drives in one of the test labs.
We found that the backup tools built into the os were not sufficient to do the job.

You need some kind of tool that has a bootable CD that runs independently of the OS.
I believe there are also Linux bootable discs that can be set up for free to do what Macrium does.

The old windows backup worked fine, the new one WIN 8 needs a bootable USB stick so $50 for a pair of 32 gig USB sticks rather than $1 for two bootable DVDs.

Third party backup software, well we used to use Veritas now Symantec NetBackup and big automated tape silos but there were some issues with it. For example it took three months to work out how to do a restore with SQL server working with their technical support. The restore instructions were incorrect and we only found the problem when I suggested doing something different than they were suggesting. We also used to have problems when the operating system got updated or even some of the software sometimes.

Oracle just recommends backing up in as many ways as possible and you hope that one will work.

I think basically as long as I can recreate the operating system on a new hard drive I’m happy but the lap top didn’t come with a recovery DVD, and seeing as it wants 32 gigs minimum for the USB stick I can understand why. The data files get copied over to the desktop and backed up onto external hard drives.

Cheerio John