Windows Backup
After installing Windows 7 in place of OS X on my MacBook Pro for work, there are only a few things I miss. But man, they were really nice.
- Unix shell
- Time Machine
The first one I’ll just say if you haven’t used a Unix-like shell of some type (Bash, zsh, whatever) then it’s hard to explain. Just that you can do everything a GUI can do (save for graphics work), but much, much faster. It’s very powerful, especially with file management.
Compared to Windows Backup, Time Machine is light-years ahead. Mainly because it’s a ‘set it and forget it’ type of thing. Here’s the number one problem with Windows Backup, it doesn’t overwrite the oldest backups. That’s right, no rolling backups. So guess what happens when your backup drive is full? It doesn’t backup. Great! If you’ve disabled the annoying Action Center, it silently fails.
You have to manually delete older backups. Here’s the process:
- Remember to check Backup status
- Start Windows Backup and wait for the service to start to show status
- Realize it’s out of space and doesn’t have any recent backups
- Click on “Manage Space” and wait for another window to load
- Click on “View Backups” to show the list below
- Click on a backup period to select it
- Click delete
- Click “Yes” on the confirmation
- Wait for it to be deleted
- Repeat steps 6-9 until a satisfactory amount have been removed
6 clicks, at a minimum, to ensure you’re backup is working. That’s pretty lame. Also, there’s no way to encrypt your backups without BitLocker (not available in all Windows 7 flavors) or a 3rd party tool. Time machine does all of that, automatically. And it’s easy to navigate. And it tells you when things go wrong.