To think I thrust a company that can’t even make a better calculator “one that sits on top”, writes help files that are worthless, or automatically reboots my computer under any circumstance for a update would write a simple backup and restore program that I control. Man! can somebody please shoot me. I have to be the most naive person that ever lived.

My point, and I do have one: One week ago my RAID controller decided it didn’t like one of its drives, so I pulled the drive out of the RAID and connected it stand-alone, and used Vista Backup to back up my system to it, I think it was drive E: at the time. No problem! Did an incremental backup a few days ago, no problem.

Plugged a fresh drive into the RAID so it’s all happy again, and reconnected that ‘failing’ hard drive (which works fine AFAICT) – it now appears as drive D: ….. and Vista Backup *refuses to list it* as a backup destination! WTF? Two days ago I could back up to it, but not tonight??

Who are these people? How the freaking hell do you fix a problem that doesn’t even generate any messages? What has changed about that drive that disqualifies it as a backup destination? Who knows!
I can tell you, after writing an iPhone app last fall on my daughter’s MacBook Pro, I’m thinking my next Windows development machine will be a beefy Mac with Parallels.

I worked for a startup once that crashed and burned. The founder said “I thought if we got a bunch of smart people together, great stuff would happen.” Microsoft reminds me of that – they’ve soaked up a good fraction of all the cleverest CS graduates for decades, and yet – somehow, all together – the result is a kind of vast, implacable stupidity.

I HATE VISTA and MS

I will say this: If any of you have tried Windows 7 you’ll know that the backup software has improved tremendously. Now you can actually pick which folders you would like to backup and make image backups. It is by no means perfect, but a vast improvement over Vista.

This is not my blog but it’s the easiest way to show you the improvements coming in Windows 7.

http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2008/10/31/backup-massively-improved-in-windows-7

Still Cobian is good and version 8 was free, so I will send that if anyone is still interested. But I’ve got board exams coming up in June so please no one hold your breath. When I get to rotations my 3rd year and I’m on something easy like Psych or Peds I hope to start writing the review.

Thanks also for the tip on XP backup. It did not work on my Vista x64 Business, but YMMV.

Vista backup wont let me leave the password field blank… ffs
so I thought, ah! I’ll be clever and map a network drive instead – WRONG!

the bag o’shite app still wont let me select the mapped drive as a target…. ffffs

pants! funnily enough I then googled for “vista backup fucking shit” and found my way here from the first link! Says a lot doesn’t it?!

The only redeeming feature that I like about Vista is the media centre stuff, it works a treat, pity about the rest. If it wasn’t for that, XP would be back on in a jot.

:-/

Excellent writeup, if you do get a chance to evaluate the software in a little more depth and come out with a favorite that you like and want to do an article for the site (with full credits to you of course), let me know. We’d love the contribution (none of us are real backup gurus and don’t know a whole lot about the space).

One is Cobian, version 8 is open-source. http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

The other is SyncBack Freeware, http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

I believe Cobian allows for differential and incremental backups. If anyone wants to join me feel free.

And I just want to say that although I too want an easy to use and powerful backup utility built into my OS (especially one like Windows for which you have to pay so much), I’m also a bit wary of this because it’s exactly what I don’t like about OS X. Sure it’s nice that OS X comes w/ all this wonderful software like iPhoto and iMovie and now TimeMachine.. what I don’t like is that when it’s done well (like it is to some degree in OS X) it destroys any need for a 3rd party software. Basically because Windows is terrible at things we have great 3rd party software. Yes I know that just because OS X is good at managing backups doesn’t mean a 3rd party can’t write software that’s better but if something free works well enough for you, why bother paying for more? the vast majority wouldn’t. Anyway that’s just a common complaint and so on the one hand I hope Windows 7 does a better job w/ their backup utility (though I’m not holding my breath) but at the same time I hope a 3rd party can create better software using the tools in Vista or Windows 7.

Excellent followup, thanks for the heads up on falling back to Windows XP backup.

So all this research finally begs the issue… does anyone know of a good (free or cheap)/robust backup solution that works well on Vista?

My NAS has the concept of scheduled rsync’s, and I know a few friends that are now using online backup solutions that have client-side utils running to keep all files in sync and revisioned, but assuming I’m not someone that necessarily wants my files all backed up to a 3rd party and just want a good backup solution… thoughts?

I also wanted to add my experience w/ the WinXP NT Backup I have from Windows XP and then installed onto Vista.

In short I DO NOT recommend it. There are a couple of major problems:

1) Sure you can choose exactly which files you wish to back up but as I said the backups are in a proprietary format.

2)If that isn’t enough to cause concern, I also wanted to let you know that the backup utility does something to the “Users” folder which forces it to be hidden. Even if I went through My Computer and selected “see hidden folders” and then right-clicked and tried to unhide the folder, it would not unhide as the option wasn’t even available to me or the actual Administrator (I have administrator privileges but I thought I’d try logging in as Administrator). I had to unhide it by running the command prompt as an administrator and breaking out old DOS syntax. It was a problem for some applications like the Indexing software, because now I couldn’t get access to the “Users” folder and not tell it to index say my private documents that I don’t want coming up on searches.

By the way to activate the administrator account, in the command prompt type: net user administrator /active:yes

And you’ll see the administrator account whenever you start up Windows. If you want to deactivate it again it’s the same command except you replace “yes” with “no” I got this excellent piece of knowledge from, http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/enable-the-hidden-administrator-account-on-windows-vista/

Actually… in XP… if you go into the Control Panel / Folder Options, you can check “Hide extensions for known file types”. This way, only the file name is displayed without the extension and when you edit the filename, you don’t have to worry about the extension. So that’s one less “plus” for Vista.

I’m not sure why more items in Control Panel in Vista is a bad thing. On one hand, you’re talking about a lack of control… and on the other, you’re saying you have too many choices.

Totally agree with respect to networking in Vista (especially wireless networking). It went from super easy in XP to equally super NOT easy in Vista. Bits and pieces are spread all around and, in general, in no logical format.

“Usama Says:
August 13th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

I guess Microsoft thought it would be better this way for novice users, but they definitely should have left the option to choose specific folders for advanced users..”

Unfortunately, the versions of Vista that are most geared towards professionals… Vista Business and Ultimate… also have severely limited control over backups. It’s fine if they want to give fewer choices to novices on their lower-end versions, but they should give more flexibility on their professional versions. After all, you pay significantly more for those versions and the only additional backup option is to do a complete PC backup.

Mind you Apple has taken a similar approach with TimeMachine in Leopard. They have severely throttled back the bandwidth that TimeMachine will use either over ethernet or wireless when backing up to a TimeCapsule. I understand the reason as TimeCapsule was designed to support multiple machines and if you have several machines doing backups at the same time using the full bandwidth, your system will come to a crawl. But… if I only have one machine (or five for that matter), I should have the OPTION to use as much of my available bandwidth as I wish. An initial backup to a TimeCapsule of a basic Leopard install can take as long as 24 hours in many cases (if you don’t have any failures) via wireless or up to six or seven hours when connected via ethernet. You can manually drag files to the TimeCapsule and they will transfer at full speed… so it is not a configuration issue but rather, TimeMachine is specifically designed to work this way.

I appreciate the followup. My experience with Vista backup was so poor I didn’t given it a chance to see that it does the following things you mentioned above.

I completely agree with you that both of these changes (.zip and splitting) are huge wins over the original backup application.

In my particular case (about 1GB of person files and 100GB of reinstallable system files) backing everything up would be a painful process and it’s just easier for me to manually copy this stuff off to a NAS unfortunately.

The Vista backup is not one file but multiple files, sure it does a horrible job grouping things in each file but at least each file is in a .zip format which is easily opened by a multitude of programs.

Having it in the .zip format allows compression, which makes my 21 GB backup a smaller 19GB. The XP backup doesn’t do that.

Finally I like having my backup external drive in FAT32 because it lets most OSes (Apple, Linux, old Windows) write to the drive. The problem is that FAT32 has a file size limit of about 4GB. Using the Vista backup sidesteps this issue since it breaks the backup into smaller .zip files.

So in the end, I think the User Interface on this new Vista Backup is terrible, and the fact that they took away the option to choose individual folders is ludicrous. However there were some improvements made. I thought I would be using the XP backup on Vista but given this file size limit and my reluctance to convert my external to NTFS, I’ll stick w/ the Vista Backup method.

Anyway I found this nice little solution:
http://www.petri.co.il/installing_windows_xp_ntbackup_on_windows_vista.htm

For example, don’t read a book if the cover of the book is ugly; don’t pay attention to helpful tips if the person giving them to you is ugly; and most *definitely*, ignore detailed software reviews if some of the language offends your sensitive nature.

Oh wait, and don’t forget to scour the web insulting random people, that’s important too.

Keep up the good work!

Why MS would replace a rock solid TCP/IP stack with one that sucks (unless you buy a router or NIC that is Vista compatible) is beyond comprehension? When did it become a requirement that network devices such as a router or NIC be compatible with an operating system?

The Ed Botts of the world would answer back with “just upgrade your equipment. I did. But ignore the fact that I am ‘prolific book author’ with loads of cash and that I can write of my purchases as expenses.”

Vista was doomed when MS decided to come with more than two versions (say Standard and Enterprise).

I agree with your take of Windows Backup. It’s a disaster. I’ve noticed lately that it appears to be performing a full backup each week. I know, I’m not altering my mp3 and image files each week, so why would it be backing up all my mp3s and images?