Vista - Experience (good and bad) with Vista Backup Center

My first reaction to the "all or nothing" approach to backup was negative...
I want to decide what to back up and when. But after I've used it for a
while, I've grown to like that approach. Disk space is just too cheap and
those decisions are just a speed bump that might prevent me from taking a
backup at all. Or from backing up everything I should.

That was the design philosophy, as I understand it, and now I agree. I have
an 80GB system and with an external 150GB I can take a file backup everyday
for weeks and the occasional CompletePC backup when things are installed.
It's very handy.

It would be nice to be able to specify when to start a fresh backup set. I
do that now by partitioning the external drive into two logical drives. When
one fills up I switch to the other.

I'm not so happy with Restore however.

Having to boot the CD to do a CompletePC restore is silly. Having an option
to install a recovery environment to a separate partition seems like it would
be simple enough. I guess I can do it by downloading 1GB of tools, but...

A bigger complaint is that the restore tries to be too simple. It's not like
having a one-click operation is necessary to convince me to restore my
system... I HAVE to restore my system. And it's extremely frustrating when I
get cryptic error messages about disk size, number of disks etc.

Problems I've had:

Wouldn't restore an image from an 80GB drive to another 80GB drive that
because it was a few hundred MB smaller when formatted. (In spite of the
system disk having 20GB free.)

Didn't like my drive configuration because it backed up from F and the new
disk installed as E. (I had to plug in a dummy IDE to get past that.)

Installs to a RAID card drive when configured with one JBOD disk, but not
when configured as RAID 1. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of having a
RAID card. This is a Promise card listed on the Hardward Compatibility site.)
Maybe it's a card problem, but it's hard to troubleshoot with a lame error
like "not enough disks". The command line option sees the same configuration
either way.


So basically, there should have been a lot more effort put into making sure
that if it's a valid backup image and a reasonable system, Restore will let
you configure a way to get it on the machine. Sure, one-click is nice if you
haven't changed the configuration at all, but if the system is older, it's
quite likely you CAN'T get the same configuration after a failure. More
complicated scenarios are acceptable when I need to get my system back.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/com...ce_maintenance

Here's the way to post a suggestion to MS: mswish@microsoft.com

If you want more features, look at something like Acronis True Image Home,
Version 10. I use both Complete PC backup and ATI.

"Trumba" <trumba@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote
> My first reaction to the "all or nothing" approach to backup was
> negative...
> I want to decide what to back up and when. But after I've used it for a
> while, I've grown to like that approach. Disk space is just too cheap and
> those decisions are just a speed bump that might prevent me from taking a
> backup at all. Or from backing up everything I should.
>
> That was the design philosophy, as I understand it, and now I agree. I
> have
> an 80GB system and with an external 150GB I can take a file backup
> everyday
> for weeks and the occasional CompletePC backup when things are installed.
> It's very handy.
>
> It would be nice to be able to specify when to start a fresh backup set. I
> do that now by partitioning the external drive into two logical drives.
> When
> one fills up I switch to the other.
>
> I'm not so happy with Restore however.
>
> Having to boot the CD to do a CompletePC restore is silly. Having an
> option
> to install a recovery environment to a separate partition seems like it
> would
> be simple enough. I guess I can do it by downloading 1GB of tools, but...
>
> A bigger complaint is that the restore tries to be too simple. It's not
> like
> having a one-click operation is necessary to convince me to restore my
> system... I HAVE to restore my system. And it's extremely frustrating when
> I
> get cryptic error messages about disk size, number of disks etc.
>
> Problems I've had:
>
> Wouldn't restore an image from an 80GB drive to another 80GB drive that
> because it was a few hundred MB smaller when formatted. (In spite of the
> system disk having 20GB free.)
>
> Didn't like my drive configuration because it backed up from F and the new
> disk installed as E. (I had to plug in a dummy IDE to get past that.)
>
> Installs to a RAID card drive when configured with one JBOD disk, but not
> when configured as RAID 1. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of having a
> RAID card. This is a Promise card listed on the Hardward Compatibility
> site.)
> Maybe it's a card problem, but it's hard to troubleshoot with a lame error
> like "not enough disks". The command line option sees the same
> configuration
> either way.
>
>
> So basically, there should have been a lot more effort put into making
> sure
> that if it's a valid backup image and a reasonable system, Restore will
> let
> you configure a way to get it on the machine. Sure, one-click is nice if
> you
> haven't changed the configuration at all, but if the system is older, it's
> quite likely you CAN'T get the same configuration after a failure. More
> complicated scenarios are acceptable when I need to get my system back.

--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]