How to recover your 'unrecoverable' laptop
Backup solutions you can rely on
Q: When does a backup not fulfil its function? A: When you cannot actually recover from it. Is this a rare problem? No, not if you are talking laptops on the move - and if you are mobile worker that probably means you. It is also a major headache for IT departments who have a responsibility for their employees' laptops (as well as their PDAs and mobile phones).
Consider the following scenario: You have a carefully prepared PowerPoint presentation plus a spreadsheet of key ROI numbers to impress a prospective customer on your laptop and, as a security, you have backed up these key files (say on a memory stick). Then, just as you arrive, you accidentally bump into some furniture and knock the laptop. Guess what? You find you can't boot it up let alone access the hard disk (Laptops are susceptible to getting knocked a lot, and the disk drive is often affected). Then you are stymied because your backed-up files cannot be restored, let alone run.
So it is worth asking how useful or otherwise are your client (laptop or desktop/Windows or Mac) backups if you lose the ability even to re-boot the system, as here. Now extend that to the whole enterprise and try doing a financial risk assessment based on this happening to any one or more of the laptops or (less frequently) desktops on any given day and to any member of staff. Include in this calculation the cost of the time involved in recovering from the problem.
In a moment I will describe a hardware and software solution I recently came across which recognises this problem and addresses it. It is not, despite superficial appearances, "just another" backup and restore package. After you have read my overview of how it works, you could try another risk and ROI calculation based on this being installed for enterprise staff. The results might surprise you...
A unique set of solutions
CMS Products, a company with a low profile (or at least it had passed me by up to now), has a neat package of hardware and software built around a small, 7oz free-standing SATA disk with a USB 2.0 connection cable. The simple-to-understand bit about CMS' Automatic Backup System (ABS) is that the software backs up the whole laptop or desktop - including the operating system - to this free-standing disk.
However, it does not do this with a sector-by-sector mirror copy. Rather, it copies individual files, the operating system, personal settings and so on (and so, for instance, it can apply compression)- and this is important. In practice it means that the very first time it takes a backup it may run for an hour or more (depending on laptop capacity and usage); but all subsequent backups only copy the changes since the previous backup, so may complete in seconds (this also means a backup can sensibly be taken on the move without a huge drain on laptop battery power).
More important is what you can do if the system becomes kaput in the way described above. The first answer is that the backup unit uses the native file format of Windows to store the files. So, if you can find an available working laptop or desktop at the prospect's office and connect the backup unit to one of its USB ports, you can do your demo from the free-standing unit. The second answer is for braver souls and engineers. The bootable ABSplus backup hard disk can be removed and inserted in place of the faulty system disk in only a few minutes while out on the road - or get a local computer shop to help. This will give you a complete working laptop again, configured exactly as previously.
The news is better still if the problem is not actually disk hardware malfunction but rather a file or operating system corruption that causes a crash such as the dreaded blue screen of death. A bootable rescue CD is included as part of the ABSplus solution. Boot up using this CD then type in the command "Image" and the aptly named BounceBack software does what amounts to a bare metal restore, wiping out all file corruptions in the process. Then you are ready to roll again with your backup unit still to hand.
Since this restore process is totally automatic, I cannot argue with the CMS's claim that this is the fastest way to restore a bootable drive.
COMMENTS
Advertorial.
What is this garbage? This is nothing but an unpaid advertisement dressed up as a bogus press release by a so-called "research" organisation that simply takes money from vendors to puff their products. Why the hell are you letting these assholes have completely free pages to print their PR material verbatim and pretending it's an El Reg story?
Oh, plus it reads like a really dull schoolboy essay. Vague wording, unclear concepts - what does the author think he's talking about in the first couple of paragraphs, where he seems to claim that a backup is no good if the machine it was taken from gets broken? You shove the pen drive in any old machine and restore your backed up files. He's stretching a point way beyond any kind of sense and making bogus comparisons. His backup isn't any more use on a computer with a dead drive than any other kind of backup, and the fact that you can plug his backup into a *new* machine and recover it there is exactly the same on his supposed counter-example of a pen drive. WTF? This is just nonsense, lies and misrepresentation. As other commenters have said, there is nothing the least bit new or unique in any of this, but because the author has been paid to reach a predestined conclusion, he has to twist and misrepresent the facts to support his so-called argument.
Did nobody read over this article before publishing it? This isn't the first time you've been caught out by your syndication. Please tell us you won't print any more of this crap from it-analysis.com or Bloor research except in the form of paid advertising.
The simple way to provide backups is...
to install the standard software environment on the system and make an image of it and burn it to bootable dvd's that could restore the base system and the standard software environment. All business data should go onto external backup media, that is system independent. A good example is an usb flash drive. Mixing business data with software results in need to fish out of this data in case the new hardware needs an os reinstall.
For protection against lost hardware, it's better to encrypt the whole disk. This way the disk partitions can be imaged and written to recovery dvds but without exposing any data. Also business data should go to protected usb drives or other portable media.
To have a completly failsafe backup method, there should be an identical backup computer ready for use in case the first one fails. If this is too expensive, the previously mentioned virtual machine based solution could work. (running a company standard virtual windows setup on a machine with preinstalled windows bought in the nearest computer shop can save the day, because it has an almost zero setup and configuration time)
I can see it now...
..your average salesperson would keep the backup drive in the same bag/car as the laptop so when it gets nicked your backup is lost aswell...
The article clearly underestimates the stupidity of end users!
How... But... WTF...
I find this article a little hard to take in! As an IT Technician I have to deal with this on a daily basis. The one thing I don't really understand is 'How does this work'? When you install windows on a machine you can't just take the HDD out and put it into another PC. The reason for this is (Assuming that the OS is XP) if any major hardware changes that take place has the potential to make the system BSOD and therefore not work.
If i have mistaken what the article was talking about then the only other way of backing up the data so someone could access it would be on a keystick like they had previously done!
bad scenario
I don't get it, has the presumed laptop in this story no copy/paste function? Or is that irrelevant to the plot?
Why would I want to use a "Backup-Solution" to backup a few slides and some spreadsheets when the copy/paste function works actually very well with USB-Sticks?
