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Loading ...One of those days
Alex Watson
Yesterday was one of those days. Just after lunch time, my hard disk began to make loud clicking noises and the kind of gurning normally associated with Russell Brand. Its time on this mortal coil was clearly coming to an end. Fortunately, it didn’t die outright, so I was able to make a complete back-up of it. Cloning the disk using freeware apps didn’t work - possibly, Gareth thinks, due to Vista’s anti-piracy techniques - but I was able to use Vista’s own Backup and Restore centre to save the complete contents of the drive to a new one, and restore my system from that. Very cool indeed, although the sheer volume of data involved meant it took a good few hours to finish.
The only slight complication with the ‘Back up computer’ option is that the disk you backup to can only be used for the purposes of retrieving the backup data - you can’t use it as your new system disk, so you actually need two spare drives to get your system running again. Apparently, this whole PC backup feature is only in Vista Ultimate, too. Needing two spare drives and Vista Ultimate isn’t a problem when you work on Custom PC, but I can’t see the wisdom in making such a killer feature so hard and pricey to use.
I wasn’t the only one suffering hardware problems yesterday, either - just before I went home, I went down to the lab, and saw this:
One of those days.
Following my last WinXP death I just rebuilt using an Ubuntu install… on a WD800 IDE drive I had spare… I think I should investigate Linux backup products! lol