Back in '96-'00 I worked large corporate IT (IS back then). As part of our disaster recovery plan, we did quarterly test restores on a large percentage of our servers. It was a pretty big deal, involving creating a test environment with its own hardware and isolated network. Lots of hours, lots of dollars spent on equipment.

I don't know of anybody who tests backups regularly on home PCs, or even in small to medium-sized businesses.

Several years ago, however, when I first installed my backup software, I did a restore just to make sure I had everything I needed should disaster strike. I had everything backed up, had time on my hands to reinstall everything if necessary, and I wanted to be sure of procedures. I've since restored twice following the same steps as that initial test.

I would recommend everybody consider going through the process at least once before you need it.

The harddrive is the slowest component of every computer system currently by orders of magnitude.

Compare the solid state drive to a high end drive like a WD Raptor 10k Rpm drive.

Raptor: 100-120 MB/s, 7-12ms latency
Standard notebook drive: 30-50 MB/s, 10-18ms latency
Solid State: 200-400 MB/s depending on the model, .1ms latency.

(Some of these numbers may be outdated, off the top of my head, but aren't too far from reality.

The latency is what kills the performance of most apps. Especially in notebooks where it's more likely to have a 5400rpm, or slower drive, to conserve power. The solid state just changes the way the system responds over all.

If you want a better recovery software use the latest Acronis True Image. It can do an initial clone and then a version chain that you can define triggers for (such as time, date, type of changes and so on). The beauty of this is that you can recover from it to a new hard drive and continue where you left off. It can even do sector-by-sector back up.

To prepare for recovery you can either burn a recovery software to CD or Flash Media and boot with that. It can see your NAS connected to your network and recover your PC off of it or for better performance you can directly connect the NAS. I use this software at work and it works flawlessly on USD 100'000+ medical equipment with 4 partitions of FAT32, NTFS, Ext3 and Linux SWAP all on one disc!

If you get it, look at the Plus Pack as well that adds some Linux support if you think you will need it.

It's similar to Time Machine on Mac but less straight forward.

EDIT: Here is a comparison of the different Acronis True Image and other Acronis products.

Backups can also have a psychological benefit. Once, on AA BOS-DFW, an FA bumped her hand on the seat back in front of me and spilled milk all over my laptop. (It didn't improve either of them.) Because I had a full disk image backup from the night before, I didn't freak out. As a result, the crew were incredibly nice; the pilot radioed ahead to DFW; I was met by their customer service manager with a printout of who I should call and what I should do; and to cut a long story short I had a check for $1,610 in my hand a few weeks later. (Most of the delay was because I didn't get a repair estimate until I got home.) Absent the backup, I doubt I would have stayed that calm. I know from what they said that the outcome would not have been as smooth, perhaps not even as fair financially.

Not so. The slowest component, by far, is the person using at the keyboard. The hard drive is at best* in second place, not even close.

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*Depending on what you're doing, network connections, printers, scanners and a few other things can also be ahead of even the slowest disk drive in this race to the bottom.

SSD = solid state drive. It's the same technology as a USB thumb drive, but in hard disk form. As a result, it is much faster. My laptop used to take a good minute or two from when I pressed the power button until I could use it - and even then, it kept loading stuff off the hard drive for several more minutes. Now it takes 20 seconds from pressing the power button to using Firefox.


On the other hand, getting angry would have accomplished zero towards fixing your computer. @:-)

This is slightly off topic, but I have been creating photo books ( I use iPhoto, but there are other brands out there) of trips we took with our kids and send copies to their grandparents. I've found that electronic media is very easy to lose, and for really important pictures of my family, it it's nice having the books "off site". I figure these books will survive whatever changes occur to standards in electronic formats.

On topic, whenever someone purchases an Apple computer, I strongly recommend getting a Time Capsule. Easy to install, hourly backups.

Critical data (well, really, ALL data) stored to a 3TB of Raid 5 on a thin client, no local data storage.

Critical data that's too big to work with across the LAN (video and music), backed up nightly to the LAN Raid system.

Critical data on the LAN backed up nightly via VPN to a thin client with a 1 TB drive at work, i.e. off-site storage, except photographs, video and music (too much data for nightly backup via VPN), which are backed up to a separate 1 TB drive on a thin client (I love those thin clients -- they're cheap and functional).

Since I've been doing this, I've not lost a byte of data.

^ Thanks, will take a look

Absolutely true, but I'm not sure I would have thought that through in the heat of the moment if I was concerned about losing weeks (or even hours) of work. The number of people who get angry over all sorts of objectively small things, be it road rage or anything else, is ample testimony to the weakness of human nature in this respect. I don't claim immunity from human failings.

What is Amazon Cloud? Is it user-friendly?

I know what an SSD is I was curious what it meant to appropriate it and why it would then lose 10GB, if that was some secret process you ran to make it even faster. Though rereading the post my guess is that you mean it is 10GB less than the hdd you had before.

I think "appropriate" means he was going to give it to his dad, but then decided to keep it after the OS blew up. Can't say I blame him. ^

I tried Acronis but was quite unhappy with it. Genie Soft was good when purchased 2 years ago, but the "free upgrade to v9, coming next quarter" is now about 8 quarters overdue. It still works, but I'll probably find something new eventually.

My data is copied to a USB drive regularly via Genie-Soft, with periodic backups to dual sets of DVD's, one in my safe, one at my in-law's house 200 miles away, and on-line backup with Carbonite, plus a large number of my original resolution photos at SmugMug.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I'm not sure I'd miss any of my personal data that much to jump through the hoops some do, I'll stick with my Time Capsule. Having lost unbacked up drives in the past, life goes on.

Yup, exactly.