shadow backup

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 15:48

Yeah, that'll teach me to try and type Latin phrases from memory. Bad idea. <Corrected by cheating and looking it up like a regular plonker>

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 15:53

The phrase was good. However, actually, not knowing the word "quod" shows me that the problems you have with the Latin language are not in the phrases. Basic knowledge, pal. Seems like the Irish lost their pre-Gaelic culture many centuries ago.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 16:07

You try spending all morning writing emails to numbskulls describing the minutia of overclocking quad-core processors on an affinity-level and see if it doesn't bleed through into your subconscious! I have quad on the brain. See? This is why I need to abuse millions of litres of water just to regain my equilibrium... hey, wait... this explains virtually the entire industrial revolution of the 19th-century! Nothing broken about my brain!

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 16:20

Kilmatead wrote:You try spending all morning writing emails to numbskulls describing the minutia of overclocking quad-core processors on an affinity-level and see if it doesn't bleed through into your subconscious!

I would if I had a clue about overclocking. I never wanted to, except for my smartphone.

Kilmatead wrote:I have quad on the brain. See?

Uhm, well.

Kilmatead wrote:This is why I need to abuse millions of litres of water just to regain my equilibrium...

Wouldn't regaining require gaining first?

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 16:37

In Ireland we used to refer to the pre-Euro "old money" (Punts), colloquially as "Quid" (and some still do) - there seems to be something about four-letter words starting with Q which muddles the mind. And then there are the Quays on the river. Spelling is such a pain when one thinks audibly and not literally (definitely the 11th daughter of Mara!). I'm one of those people who sings song-lyrics which bear no relation whatsoever to the real lyrics just because they sound better.

Quad-bikes are just things for 4 year-olds to kill themselves on at Christmas, as is traditional in the rural areas. Very sad. Quad-cores, on the other hand, are great fun to stress at parties - there's a certain satisfaction in wasting about a billion times the computing power as was used to put a man on the moon - just so I can play videogames on the weekend without a hint of stutter.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 17:36

Now what is a Quay? :shock:

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 17:50

Dublin Quays - pronounced "Keys". Essentially wharfs. Just another excuse for city-planners to add 100 more things to "name" after famous people who got themselves imprisoned, shot, both, or otherwise socially discombobulated in the name of The Republic.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 17:52

I see. So, basically, this is the only excuse?

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 18:00

They will take any excuse - I've never understood the concept where every single block-section of a street needs to have its own name, whereas Yonge St. in Canada seems happy enough to keep the same name for 1,896 km. Here, every 20 steps the name changes to some other dead person. You'd think they'd run out of them after awhile - I'm of the sort who appreciates a certain consistency in his nomenclature - other than the consistency of death and nobility.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 18:14

I was in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. I tried to find Karl-Marx-Allee 70. The street ended after number 52, some other street began. After I had reached the end of that street, number 54 was there. Oh dear.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 09, 18:24

Considering Wikipedia tells me it used to be called Stalinallee, there's something suspicious about the whole thing. Never mind that Karl Marx is buried in London. I bet it was stuff like this that chased Kafka out of Prague - or, even better, the Prague out of Kafka.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2013 Mar 09, 18:26

Not that Karl Marx would have had much better ideas than Stalin anyway.

drac · Post by **drac** » 2013 Mar 09, 20:14

OK, back to the topic of doing backups with image rather than file/folder.

If my system has a problem (be if from a virus, a newly installed program or self inflicted) it is just pure luck if a file/folder restore can fix the problem. They are fine for recovering lost or corrupted data. But if my system crashes and cannot boot (as happened to a client this past week) I doubt if a program like rsync would be much help. At best one would have to reinstall the OS (and possibly all its updates - and with Windows that can take a while) then - if rsync had EVERY file and folder on the entire computer, maybe one could get back to the current state before the crash. And since my hard drive is divided into 6 logical partitions, a file/folder solution would also require me to reparation the drive and restore each partition’s files separately. Whereas with the image backup, in under 40 minutes, I had restored the clients computer to a working state - and I did not have to be there while it did the restore. And if the issue was that the hard drive had failed and I needed a new hard drive, with the image files I could restore all the sectors - including the MBR, hidden partitions, etc. I do not believe rsync can do that. Certainly having any backup is usually better than having none. Unless the backup is recent and COMPLETE it is likely that getting ones computer and its content back is going to involve a fair degree of time and effort.

I do daily incremental backups, weekly full backups and a monthly full backup which is kept offsite. As Kilmatead said, the incremental’s take just a couple of minutes and are unnoticeable. The full backups take less than an hour and I usually do them while I am away from the computer - though I can do them while working on the computer (thank you VSS). Sure, it cost me $50 but, the peace of mind I get is worth it (I use my computer for business - though I am sure Kilmatead’s porn is just as important to him as my business related files are to me).

atitlan · Post by **atitlan** » 2013 Mar 11, 19:00

Imaging applications are nice to have for computer retailers which have common setups then. Other than that, they're a waste of time.

Not. One can make sequential changes to a system, image them and then restore them in turn to work / experiment further.

This weekend 24-hours of Windows Defender definition updates broke Defender in a way that made it appear a deep corruption in Windows 8 or a serious malware assault.

Using a three-day old image I was able to determine it was only bad definitions and thus could wait until Microsoft caught the bug(s) and issued a corrective set of defs. Roughly within 24-hours. (I remember several years ago ESET used to update Nod32 in ways that simply broke all of Vista and never patched their patches / updates in less than one week.)

Images also allow me to maintain two Windows 8 systems differentiated only by their versions of Office (w/the corresponding Outlook).

In seven years I have never had an Acronis image that validated fail to restore. I will concede that their incessant changing of the GUI is absurd and counter-productive, as well their quality control has been way off since 2010. The 2013 version, however, seems to have succeeded straight off.

An interesting side-benefit, if it may be called that, of the Acronis validation process is that twice, on separate systems, its failure indicated hardware faults: once in a 4 GB memory module and once of the chipset controller on a Gigabyte motherboard. In each case Windows and all other applications appeared to running completely normally.