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home :: software :: WindowsBackup

Sun, 30 Jun 2013

Windows backup software

Windows 8 task manager

I have been using the Time Machine backup software under Mac OS X for a number of years now. It's quite good, and once saved me, as a disk in one of my iMacs crashed, and I was able to restore the machine to a full working state by just changing the hard disk in it, and using the Time Machine to restore it to its last known working state. I did not lose a thing!

Time Machine is also very nice to use: you just plug an external disk in one of the USB ports, and voila: a couple of simple manipulations and you're on your way.

So, given this experience, I decided to try the Windows backup software that came with Windows 7 Ultimate. It's not as nice, and now that it's also ridiculously slow...

I have a relatively fast Windows 8 64-bit desktop machine (3.4GHz, 8GB of memory, and 2 x 1TB of disk space)... well, i've been backing it up to an external USB3 2TB external drive for literally hours now, and it's still at 31% completion!

What's worse, it that it doesn't appear to be doing very intensive I/O to the USB3 disk, as can be seen in the above snapshot from the Windows 8 task manager...

Disks fail. Not all the time, but eventually they do. Being able to back up my PC to a local USB drive would seem like something that should come into the box with the O/S I purchase... heck, Unix has had tar and cpio for years.

Oh well.

Time to go to sleep now.

/software | Posted at 19:16 | permanent link