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backups and trust
Friday, August 28 2015
It has been unseasonably cool almost to the point of autumnal for the past couple days, and that continued today. It's made gathering firewood feel like less of a chore to not return to the woodshed with a backpack of firewood and drenched in sweat. Today's 105 pounds came from a largish dead tree I'd cut earlier about 80 feet southeast of the Stick Trail's Chamomile crossing.
I'd tried a number of approaches to copy my existing Windows 7 installation to media from which it could then be transferred to a new 1.8 inch 128 GB solid state drive. The first was DriveImage XML, but it failed to produce a bootable USB drive, so I abandoned it and tried using Window's built-in ability to backup an OS and then later restore it. But the restores always failed, and usually in a way that suggested that perhaps Windows backups demand to be restored to a volume that is identical to the one it was backed up from. Obviously, this would make Windows backup pretty much useless for moving to a new hard drive or even one bought to replace a drive that had just died. How often, after all, are such volumes identical in size? I could be wrong about what Microsoft backup/restore can and cannot do, but the functionality as implemented seems like sort of an afterthought and doesn't give me much confidence. One thing I know for sure is that I would never actually trust backups resulting from Microsoft Backup & Restore. The only real experience I've had with Microsoft Backup & Restore other than the failures today involved tape drives backing up Windows servers, particularly the server belonging to the Bard Prison Initiative in Eastern Correctional Facility, but also servers at the various tech companies I've worked for. From what I recall, those backups always happened without error, but any time anything needed to be restored from the resulting tapes, nothing could ever be recovered. Useless scheduled backup routines are actually worse than no backup routines at all, because at least in the absence of official backup routines, individuals tend to do more ad hoc backing up, which, though incomplete, does backup something.
A pirated copy of Acronis True Image finally gave me success with my system migration, and all that was left to do was resize the drive volume so as to take advantage of the new space. Windows 7 has a provision for doing that, but it's useless in nearly all cases because it only works for non-boot volumes (good work, guys!). So I had to pirate a fresh copy of EaseUS Partition Master 10.2, since the pirated copy I last used does not work on 64 bit OSes (and the free version doesn't do volume resizing). It handled the volume resizing quickly and without complaint. When all of this was done, my laptop (Hyrax) turned into the sort of computer we'd always wished we'd had before the invention of the Solid State Hard Drive (SSD). Windows opened instantly and the thing could be rebooted in seconds. My desktop (Woodchuck) also has an SSD, and it has a processor that runs twice as fast as the one in Hyrax, but it has so many screens and programs that have to open every time it boots that it doesn't feel quite as responsive.
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