Re: Death of a Computer...

In article <Xns9AFAC3E89C06Cduckrulestheuniverse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
duck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
John Black wrote:

I don't understand why people would want to backup their applications or
the operating system?

So that you can very quickly and easily restore your system, should something
happen to it.

These things are backed up via the install disks
and as you say, restoring them via a backup to a new drive or PC is nearly
impossible anyway for all the reasons you cite and more.

You obviously have never used a good imaging program. The best of them can
even restore images of an operating system to different hardware.

What is the best one in your opinion? Where does it put the images?

Yes, on a new
system you are going to have to re-install the apps. but you are going to
have to do that anyway. The effort of doing that is less than the effort
needed to try to figure out how to make them all portable -- the average
person is not going to mess with disk images and keeping them up to date
nor should he. Just back up *your files*. Your pictures, your videos,
your Word documents, your RSB archives, whatever you have created or
downloaded that you want to keep. Doing that is a lot quicker and easier
than backing up 15 million OS and application files and pretty much just
as good.

Why not do both? That's the idea behind partitioning as well. You put all
your stuff (what you wanted to make "portable") on a drive or partition
SEPARATE from windows.
Why not have the ability to restore your OS to an earlier time when
everything worked perfectly? If your documents are located on another drive,
all you really need to back up is stuff like favorites, desktop items, etc.
Now all your critical data is also on a partition by itself, and backing it
up is made simple because you don't have to pick through the windows files to
get to it.

All this stuff (like linux) is great for techies but techies are the only
ones who are going to bother messing with partitioning drives and drive
images. If you tell the average computer user who's machine came with
everything pre-installed to do all of this, he is likely to do nothing (or
you will end up doing it for him). I've done all of this in the past and
I don't even bother with it anymore. 90+% of the people can understand
"dump the files you care about to DVD or to another drive" and that is
easy enough so that most people will actually sucessfully do it. Mybook
sounds like a great idea -- external and can be automated.

John Black
.

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