It's the middle of the night, and I'm reformatting a hard drive.
What happened is that my daughter managed to pick up a piece of malware, and nothing I could do in the normal course of events could get rid of it. So, we're going nuclear.
Of course, she has no backups. Some time ago, I set up an automatic job to back up her Documents folder, and it occurs to me now that perhaps it would have been a snappy idea to get that backup off her PC before doing this. Then again, considering how polluted her PC was -- get the desktop up, and all sorts of things open and close by themselves -- perhaps I wouldn't have been able to do that.
As I sit here, wondering if this will work, it makes me think again about backups, and how they ought to work. I won't go into details; any one can spin the tale of what they ought to do. I'm not talking magic and mirrors; just something better than what exists now, something that recognizes that there will be users who don't back up files, who don't schlep the PC over to where the external hard drive is to offload them.
Not that having such an external backup helps in getting back to normality. You've got to figure out how to make the system accept them, make them usable. There is no DFDSS for Windows.
Plus, her operating system is Vista. (I need say no more).
It puts me in mind of when we moved the software from my mother in laws PC to her new one. It was very difficult, and I found myself thinking, not for the first time I know we're not the first to have to do this. Why is it so difficult?
And don't say: Why, because it's Windows, of course!
4 comments:
I absolutely swear my next computer OS will be Apple. My new W-7 PC locks up at least once a month while I process something simple and not memory intensive. It has an automatic back-up feature and I am trying to back it up to a CD, but I have tried three times and it hangs at 25%. I want to buy a peripheral hard drive for my photos and maybe I can use that for the back-up...once I get some free cash.
I think that Vista was the best ad for a Mac ever made, myself. Nice to know that the new operating system's carrying the torch.
Until you have a Mac. Then you will miss your Windows.
(I know, heresy, but still...Macs are not magic! A good PC beats a run of the mill Mac any day.)
Not that it really matters, within a few years, the way things are going, everything will be on blades at a remote location.
And then it won't matter if you are connecting with a Mac, a PC, (darn it, a MAC IS a PC....just an apple flavored PC), a blackberry flavored PC, a phone, or a red hat linux terminal. They will all perform the same (wonderfully), never need backups (because they are automatic), will not need de-fragmenting, or any proprietory anti-virus, and anti-hijack software. Updates won't matter, and nobody will give a hoot about the latest Win seven or vista or whatever because it won't really matter.
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/local/pdf/solutionbriefs/3510251-en.pdf
I know that blades, and generically cloud computing, are the desire of many who are seriously into the future of computing. Me, I just don't trust it. Hey, you're talking to someone who runs a fifteen year old copy of Quicken, and is quite happy with it.
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