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However, Windows is not my day-job OS, and I need to be economical with the time, energy, and number of neurons I spend babysitting that OS.

So what were you doing up until now? Reading each KB article? Vetting each update on a test system? I dont' really see that based on you response, so how on earth does THIS cumulative update model really change anything for YOU exactly?!!

Meanwhile, a dead simple off-the-shelf backup software packages for windows suitable for a single system seems like a perfect solution...

For example...this is pretty much exactly what you seem to need...but choose any you like.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/p...

Full Disk-Image Backup

Back up your entire computer including your operating system, applications and data, not just files and folders to an external hard drive or NAS.

You've already got the photographs properly protected; so this would be a perfect solution for the operating system.

that more likely I am to just switch to a platform that's more reliable and is easier to rebuild.

For Photoshop and Lightroom? What platform OSX? Here, I'll save you some time:

====
Q:
I installed the latest version of Mavericks and it broke some stuff (instruments) which I cannot afford to have broken. Is there a way to roll back to my previous release? Am currently on 10.9.2 and want to go to 10.9.1 or 10.9.

A: (paraphrased)
there is not an uninstall feature for patches, upgrades and even apps.

Unfortunately the only real way to do this is to wipe the drive, install the pervisous version, assuming you have the installer or can find it and restore from backup.

http://apple.stackexchange.com...
=====

OS X invented cumulative software updates that can't be rolled back.

And Linux or BSD don't even run photoshop or lightroom.

So, what exactly is your plan?

Since Windows has a ton of scope creep and behind the scenes changes that go on it seems with ever update or install, I leverage Acronis' Try and Decide feature. It works although I haven't tried it at the full O/S upgrade level. For that I still use Acronis in terms of a full backup and recovery if necessary. For all other updates or new installs I really like Try & Decide. I have never tried it but there's also Returnil which a lot of people seem to have good luck with as well.

As to goal... I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC

Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.

If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.

You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)

My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis or PING. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.

You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.

Before I left Acronis, I was the lead developer and designer for deduplication in Acronis Backup & Recovery 10. We also used SHA256 there, and naturally the possibility of a hash collision was investigated. After we did the math, it turned out that you're about 10^6 times more likely to lose data because of hardware failure (even considering RAID) than you are to lose it because of a hash collision.

Take a look at something like Acronis TrueImage (or any Norton program) before/after their transition from C++ to C++-with-C#-user-interface.

As someone who worked in Acronis, and wrote a bunch of code for True Image, I feel obliged to tell you that there's no C# code in it at all - it's all pure C++. Acronis SDK (which is a separate thing, and IIRC comes only with True Image Enterprise) has component that exposes .NET API, and that's written in C#, but it's separate from True Image proper, and those C# APIs are just sanitized wrappers on top of the original COM API (which is implemented in C++), and, in fact, most of C# code there is automatically generated from COM interfaces (I know that because I'm the guy who originally designed that part of it).

As for GUI in True Image (and pretty much all other Acronis products) - it's FOX Toolkit, or rather, forked and heavily-customized version of it (since it's LGPL'd, you can request the source code with customizations here).

Hello,

Here is a list of data recovery programs I have put together. Some of them may be a little old, for floppies or optical media only, but should still be useful. Unless otherwise noted, they are all for Microsoft Windows.

A-FF Labs - NTFS Undelete and Partition Find and Mount
Access Data - FTK Imager
Acronis - RecoveryExpert
Advanced NTFS Recovery - NTFS Recovery (may handle FAT32 as well)
bitMART - Restorer Ultimate
Brant, Dmitry - DiskDigger
BriggSoft - Directory Snoop
CGSecurity - TeskDisk and PhotoRec
Convar - PC Inspector File Recovery
Digital Assembly - Adroit Photo Recovery (pictures only)
DiskInternals - NTFS Recovery
DIY Data Recovery - iRecover
DTI Data - Recover It All
DataRescue.Com - PhotoRescue (intended for flash RAM cards, which are typically formatted with FAT, may work with other devices as well)
EASEUS - Data Recovery & Security Suite
Fsys Software - DFSee
Gibson Research Corp. - Spinrite
Gillware - GillWare File Viewer
Higher Ground Software - Hard Drive Mechanic Gold
Kato, Brian - Restoration (also here)
LC Technology -
[Continued in next message, as for some reason, Slashdot would not let me post in its entirety (too many URLs?). AG]

Hello,

Here is a list of data recovery programs I have put together. Some of them may be a little old, for floppies or optical media only, but should still be useful. Unless otherwise noted, they are all for Microsoft Windows.

A-FF Labs - NTFS Undelete and Partition Find and Mount
Access Data - FTK Imager
Acronis - RecoveryExpert
Advanced NTFS Recovery - NTFS Recovery (may handle FAT32 as well)
bitMART - Restorer Ultimate
Brant, Dmitry - DiskDigger
BriggSoft - Directory Snoop
CGSecurity - TeskDisk and PhotoRec
Convar - PC Inspector File Recovery
Digital Assembly - Adroit Photo Recovery (pictures only)
DiskInternals - NTFS Recovery
DIY Data Recovery - iRecover
DTI Data - Recover It All
DataRescue.Com - PhotoRescue (intended for flash RAM cards, which are typically formatted with FAT, may work with other devices as well)
EASEUS - Data Recovery & Security Suite
Fsys Software - DFSee
Gibson Research Corp. - Spinrite
Gillware - GillWare File Viewer
Higher Ground Software - Hard Drive Mechanic Gold
Kato, Brian - Restoration (also here)
LC Technology -
[Continued in next message, as for some reason, Slashdot would not let me post in its entirety (too many URLs?). AG]

Holy over-engineering Batman! How about simplifying that solution with image-based backup software. Macrium Free or if you have some bucks to spend Acronis is easier and a bit more polished.

Didn't the users notice the significant performance hit when wrapping their whole desktop in a VM?

I don't use windows daily, but I have windows box for games. And what I do, to avoid having to waste endless hours investigating this sort of stuff, is maintaing fresh images of my hard drive.

Simply keep OS and installed programs on C: drive, back up its entire image often. Something happens, wipe it and put _stable_ image over it.

I suggest Acronis True Image Maker.

It is unfortunate that acronis don't offer a free solution, but (despite this fact) I'm still going to recommend them heartily for being solid and damned good. Judging by the fact that your work is "classified" I'm guessing they could afford to shell out a few bucks for the home edition. I've also seen hack jobs put together out of FreeDOS boot disks and file transfers.

My weapon of choice is Acronis TrueImage. Allows for complete drive imaging over a network, etc. They offer BartPE files so you can make a boot disc, though.

I use the boot CD all the time for rescue and recovery.

Depending on how long you need to keep the backup, Acronis makes some great imaging utilities with free trials

Why anyone would risk the royal PITA of having their machine completely boned and having to spend hours or even days restoring everything to its original state when a simple disc image could restore it back to health in a few minutes is beyond me. Maybe it's because I've spent so many years fixing Windows boxes in repair shops, but the thought of actually sitting at home for all that time trying to fix a boned Windows install just doesn't cut it for me. So I have an image of each machine in my family with a clean install for when I need to clear the "bitrot", and I keep a monthly image made of each machine on a portable drive in case anything breaks and I need to just send it back a few weeks. But that is my 02c on the subject,YMMV

for the more tech savvy, i recommend making an image of a harddrive after the OS and whatever other programs have been installed. I did this for my mom's new computer; i reloaded XP (it came with vista home or something along those lines), installed all her favorite programs, set them up, did a virus/spyware scan, etc etc. after everything was said and done, i loaded Acronis True Image, made an image, and burned it to a boot-able DVD using their boot image.
So now, if there is some weird software glitch or she installed / uninstalled too much crap, i just tell her to back up all her personal documents, pop the dvd in, reboot the computer and voila. a few screens and clicks later, she's back to how it was when she first got it.
seriously, that little app has saved me so much work and time. (not a slashvertisement! i don't work for them, i swear!)

First of all, to all you smug pricks who offer comments like "don't keep important data on a laptop" or "your business model is broken" - this ia a real problem for many people. If you don't have a real suggestion then STFU. It should be well understood in a place like Slashdot that not every IT guy gets to set corporate policy. Sometimes you have to work with what you've got.

On the topic of laptop backups, I've been dealing with this issue for years. Here are some thoughts:

For simply backing up a few critical files, consider a USB Flash Drive. I usually write a simple .bat file using xcopy to backup particular files or folders, then create a shortcut with a friendly name for users to double-click on. With a bit of thought you could probably create an autorun.inf file that backs up when the USB stick is inserted. One caution - drive letters may be slightly unpredictable.

For a more thorough backup, clone the entire drive to an external drive. There are many programs that can do this but these days my favourite is Acronis True Image. Acronis could clone on a schedule if you can train users to connect an external drive overnight, for example. It's always nice to have a complete backup including OS, applications and data. Acronis also lets you browse inside a backup image and extract individual files if needed.

What I've always really wanted was a solution that would detect when a server was reachable and backup transparently. I use something just short of this on my own laptop - product called Mirror Folder that I schedule to copy specific folders when I'm connected to my home network every night. This could probably work over a VPN as well. Very simple, very cheap.

If you have a larger budget than me you might be interested in something like Atempo LiveBackup.

1) http://www.avast.com/
2) http://www.acronis.com/

A more detailed approach (for the truly paranoid/something to hide). This one is for the Windows folk...

-Starting with a new laptop, wipe your computer's HD with DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke - http://dban.sourceforge.net/)
-Install your OS and default applications, but NO DATA
-Use something like "Acronis True Image" ( http://www.acronis.com/ ) and take a snapshot of your HD. Save it to a bootable DVD

-Before travelling to other country with invasive customs laws, save your data to your own server at home that has an encrypted method of remote access (SSL, Hamachi, etc), then DBAN your computer and re-load your clean install image.

-Go through customs, allow them to investigate your squeeky clean laptop if they so desire.

-When at your destination, connect to your home server and load your data. Throw it on a Truecrypt partition while you're there, just to be safe.

-Before flying home, connect up again and sync your changed data back to the server, DBAN your laptop, reload the clean install image.

-Fly home

Since big hard drives are relatively cheap, rotating external hard drives and using Acronis might do the trick.

Sorry I should have been more clear (without any ad referrers in the URL). It's a 15 day trial, but then how long does it take to move from one to another? There should be no serial number tricks with this one, but if there is? Then an older version is easy to get. Anyway it works and it's about as easy as the process is ever going to get (even faster than DD). Drivers isn't an issue because it uses pre-existing ones (SATA people will like that). It also resizes the new partitions, so there's no wasted space.

I would have recommended this. I used the free version to go from a PATA to a SATA.

Acronis True Image does the same thing for Windows. I like it a lot.

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Acronis.

Disclaimer: the following is the author's personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer

Acronis True Image Home ($49.99 if buying online) has all the features you seek, except for one - not using any proprietary file format for backups. It should be noted though that what you ask for is simply not possible to do in many cases, since some special format is needed to handle things such as splitting of large files into chunks small enough to fit on one CD/DVD, and even more so for incremental backups and other advanced features; so any sufficiently advanced backup software is going to use some proprietary format for this purpose (for the lack of any open standard on such things). However, if your worry is that you will not be able to access your backups if you ever lose the software, then it is not the issue: when backing up to CD/DVD, you have an option to have it bootable and include the restore component of the software. If you need to restore at any later point, and do not have True Image installed, you can still boot from that CD/DVD, and have all the functionality readily available.

I actually went out originally and bought Acronis True Image Home http://www.acronis.com/, for my home system, it's already saved me once. - It does disk images, as well as file based images. - Incremental and Differential - Scheduled backups - Password Protected images. - Operates online to do images. Also if you use the Secure Zone, you can do live restores (Acronis Snap Restore), which would allow you to start a complete restore of the system, and after the essential files are loaded up, it would boot up and restore files in the background, so you can run the system while it's in the process of restoring the complete system. But for $50 US it's a good steal.. My only issue is that you lose download rights after a certain period of time, unless you pay more for that. That I would like changed, but for $50 it's already saved me once. And at work it's become very useful, especially the workstation version that can make images to FTP servers, instead of requiring special severs. Also they have a Universal Restore addon option, that replaces the drivers in the HAL for XP.. though it doesn't work for Unix, but it's not often hard to make a unix box work with new hardware (as long are your modifying the correct kernel). j.

http://www.acronis.com/

that's all you'll ever need ... setup a back up server and you can back up a networked computer while its still running, but its flexible enough to use for home user needs as well.

Use Acronis' TrueImage Home ($50 at http://www.acronis.com/

I allocate a partition, named "X:" and schedule a 100% image of all other drives to that partition (you can also do it to another hard drive, even a USB-connected external drive). You can compress, or not, as you wish (I use their standard compression, and have it configured to be broken in to 700MB chunks, in case I need to move it to CDs.) My backup runs automatically, every Sunday, at 2:30 am.

Make an occasional copy of the entire backup to CD or DVDs (I often use Dual-Layer DVDs to get 9GB commpressed, or about 18GB of original content, per disk).

Now, getting to back: Run TrueImage, use the option to "Mount the backup." It loads up the entire backup as a new set of drives (say, S: is your C: drive, T: is you D:, etc.). You can map the copy on the the X: partition, or the one from your disks (although the latter will require some disk-shuffling if its' a big backup). Now copy from the backup to your active drives at will. Then "Unmount" the drive. No clumsy "Recovery" like conventional backup tools like the excrable "Backup MyPC."

Nope it's useful. I've set up dozens of these at client sites, and they love it. They're always backed up (say, daily), and they can make easy off-site copies (say, typically 2 DVD, or one Dual-Layer DVD) once a week.

Try it. You'll like it.

Why not just have a PXE server on hand to quickly and easily image your computers over the network? If a system goes down, it'll take only a few minutes to image it with a sysprepped base install and bring it back. Acronis SnapDeploy http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdep loy/ provides this functionality quite handily, bundling the PXE server and image deployment in one nice little package. This is quite a viable solution if you don't have too many hardware platforms to support, or one need a few basic images of a locked down XP workstation.

With VM's, aside from the bandwidth and performance considerations, realize that the host machine could just as easily go down. Then you're stuck again. Though this is less likely, it is a possibility. If you do decide to go this route, do consider cacheing the downloaded VM between sessions (so the mass download every morning doesn't happen).

I've heard of a company, Moka5 http://www.moka5.com/, attempt to do something similar. I'm not sure what their status is, but it might be something to look into for the future.

Though this is an interesting idea, there are a number of detractions. I'm a huge fan of virtualization, and have found it great for development, testing, and on server platforms. Rolling it out on desktops as primary workstations seems a bit ambitions. However, I still wish you the best of luck.

Roy Shi.

You can even create one image using Acronis True Image and then restore to different machines using Acronis True Image with Universal Restore plugin, that reconfigures original image to match machine you are restoring.

My experience with disk imaging is that Acronis is far better than Symantec Ghost, which is actually the old PowerQuest DeployCenter.

Symantec did something that amazes me. Symantec bought PowerQuest. Symantec abandoned their own product, called Ghost, and substituted a product from another company. The substituted product, PowerQuest DeployCenter, now called "Ghost", had numerous completely different quirks and issues.

The new "Ghost" box, which I just bought about month ago, includes the "new version of Ghost" which is DeployCenter, I'm told, and a second CD that includes the last version of the old, real Ghost, called on the CD "Ghost 2003". This old, real Ghost is a dead product, apparently.

(I just checked the box again. I have the "Norton Ghost" box and CDs in front of me. I bought the new copy for $9.99 after update rebate and another rebate.)

It's a new low in software company abuse: A software company has switched products without telling its users.

My experience of Symantec technical support is that the company is undergoing a social breakdown. Symantec technical support people have found that they can reduce their work load by being hostile to callers.

Our experience with Acronis is that it has its own issues, insufficiencies, unexplained failures, sales people lacking any technical knowledge, and very sloppy technical support. However, many people, including me, are recommending Acronis TrueImage over "Ghost".

Always report computer company abuses to Ed Foster's GripLog.

Acronis Universal Restore.

You install everything on one machine, and then prep it for a transfer using MS Sysprep tools. Create a disk image with Acronis, and then, when the time comes to restore it to dissimilar hardware, the restoration program will allow you to replace drivers and even the HAL.

Acronis Universal Restore.

You install everything on one machine, and then prep it for a transfer using MS Sysprep tools. Create a disk image with Acronis, and then, when the time comes to restore it to dissimilar hardware, the restoration program will allow you to replace drivers and even the HAL.

The easiest way is by using Acronis True Image and Microsoft's Sys-Prep utility.

A lot of people talk about Ghost and I used Ghost for years, but once you try Acronis True Image you will dump ghost and never look back!

http://www.acronis.com/

How about Acronis Snap Deploy: http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdep loy/ ?
Or
Paragon Deployment Manager 7.0: http://www.paragon.ag/dm ?

Of course neither is OSS or free, but maybe they are better than Ghost?

It is pure and simple junk. I have used earlier revisions of the product and they were great, but the new methods they imploy to duplicate drives has only served to corrupt drives for me, and in fact I was forced to reload from backup. When I called Symantec for support I was connected to outsourced support in India, with no Symantec suppport options above level 1 technicians, and these fellows who knew less about the product.

After sending me links to the FAQ's availible on the Symantec web page (which I had read and executed) they were unable to provide any additional help.

Needless to say, I was glad I had a backup, I restored, tossed the $90 Ghost package, and installed Arconis TrueImage http://www.acronis.com/

Have never looked back, and would never reccomend that anyone use Ghost

Try Acronis True Image and leave the dark side behind entirely. ;-) It's definately better than Ghost.

I didn't scrutinize their license agreement WRT large numbers of computers, but do suggest you give it a good look.

http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm for a few machines or http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/true image/ for many.

The products have spoken for themselves for me, I use them exclusively. true image has a bartpe plugin, also.

True Image Server: $699.
True Image Enterprise: more, but worth it.

"Institutionalized bitching from people who hate "ask slashdot" on principle is easily twice as lame as running to someone else whenever you have a technical problem you can't solve yourself."

Like this one.

MSI-K8T-Neo-FSR MB.
|
|
(VIA RAID AMD Chipset)
|
---------SATA Seagate ST3200822AS 200GB (Windows 2000. HDA)*
|
|
|
---------SATA Seagate ST3250823AS 250GB (Linux, HDC)

The first is Master #0, second Master #1

GRUB is on the latter, but Windows will not boot. I have to hit F11 during booting, and select the drive to boot Windows. The other will boot via GRUB till it gets to a problem (I'm working on. Maybe an Initrd problem).

*I recommend Migrate Easy 7.0 for moving W2K from a smaller drive to a larger drive. 15 Day trial, but otherwise not crippled, and it appears to be easier than Ghost.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migr ateeasy/

See, for example, Acronis products. Far above any alternatives I'm aware of, especially the disk partitioning tool. There are more if you look.

There was two people in the drive imaging game, until Symantec bought PowerQuest last year.

Well not quite, there's always Acronis so if you wan't decent tools, go there instead. As for PowerQuest - I used to like Partition Magic but it hosed my partition table while trying to fix a disk geometry error (caused by the FreeBSD installer bug) so I dropped it. Partition Magic still has the better GUI (more intuitive) but Acronis Partition Expert beats it on reliability.. and ReiserFS support. I don't know much about Acronis True Image though but it's probably a good alternative if you can't use tar, dd and gzip for backup/imaging.

For full image backups, try Acronis. Symantec learned customer care from Microsoft, it appears.

With Acronis, you can make a full system drive backup of Windows XP while Windows is running.

Last time I checked, Ghost was VERY quirky.

--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

I did a eval of backup solutions, and Acronis won hands-down for ease of use; it's saved me big time several times this year. I'm a very satisfied customer.

NTBackup that comes with Windows can NOT backup all the Windows system drive, only part of it. Windows XP and 2000 (not Windows 98) have crippled file systems, apparently to implement copy protection.

NTBackup presumes that you are a peon whose time is worth nothing, and you don't mind loading all of your programs again. Some people restore a backup over a working Windows XP installation, but this is said by Microsoft technical support people to be unstable.

The ONLY way to back up a Windows XP and 2000 system drive is to do a sector by sector copy. See my Slashdot story and a discussion of this: Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?. The story gives a method of copying under Linux.

However, most sector by sector copies require that you have complete control over the drive.

The only solution I've found is Acronis TrueImage. It costs $50, and it works, although there are some small flakinesses. You can backup a Windows XP or 2000 system drive while Windows is running and being used. You can send the backup over a network to a local Linux machine.

To send the backups over the Internet, you would encrypt the Acronis files with GNU Privacy Guard first. There is a way to submit the password to GPG in a batch file. Since anyone who has access to the password has access to the backup files, this is not a security risk.

Google has more links to GPG.

I'm interested in hearing about any experiences anyone has with this.

Microsoft enthusiasts: Please don't disagree with the facts here, they have been verified many times by Microsoft articles and technical support people. Specifically, the NTFS file system is crippled, and NTBackup cannot back up the working system partition.

Two drive RAID 1 mirroring is good. We've had a lot of trouble recently getting tech support from Promise Technology, so we have switched to HighPoint RocketRAID 133 adapter cards.

These RAID cards use the main CPU, they don't have on-board microprocessors. This causes some problems in Windows XP when you have a script that runs at startup. Some commands in the script will sometimes cause the mirror to break, apparently. Apparently Microsoft has not integrated some of the CLI commands into Windows XP yet. This was such a big problem that I wrote a paper on it for Microsoft technical support: Windows XP problems: Port Re-direction.

If you are willing to spend a little more, a lot of people suggest 3Ware products: 7006-2 adapter cards, for example. We have no experience with them. They have a drawback, compared to HighPoint cards: They won't boot with just one drive, according to 3Ware technical support. After the drives are used in a mirror, they will not boot from the IDE adapter on the motherboard. This could be a big drawback if your 3Ware card is not working for some reason. Possibly 3Ware cards available in the future will not be incompatible, leaving you no way to get your data from the drives. If the card fails, you will at least have to buy another one to be able to see your data.

The advantage with 3Ware cards is that there is a CPU on the adapter, leaving no way for MS bugs to cause the mirror to break. That system is also faster, of course.

I wrote a Slashdot article about RAID 1: Mirroring Controllers - What have been Your Experiences?. Note that the Slashdot software has a bug that will not let you see all the comments in nested mode. That bug is years old.

Slashdot has run a number of articles from people who wrestle with the data reliability problem.

Acronis makes backup software that has been generally good for us. It is possible to do a full hard disk backup of a Windows XP hard drive while Windows XP is running. (This uses XP's Shadow Copy mode.

Slashdot also published a story I wrote about drive imaging software: Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?. Best sentence: "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems. The file system cannot copy some of the files that are necessary to the operating system. If you don't have experience with Microsoft operating systems, you may find this amazing..."

Windows XP keeps most of its settings in files collectively called the registry. So, no backup is complete unless you back up everything on the boot drive. MS tech support has told me many times that there is no way to do this with Microsoft tools. The recommend a "third party" method. We've tried the third party methods, and had a lot of grief with everthing except Acronis. Symantec has given us poor and unfriendly technical support, in my opinion. Symantec bought its competitor PowerQuest; I view that as a bad sign.

It is really, really miserable for me that Microsoft treats me, and every customer, as a criminal by building in copy protection that mixes all the programs and settings together; the copy protection causes me a lot of grief, and significantly damages the entire design of the OS. Linux is a very strong competitor in that area. Everyone is a friend of Linux, users are not criminals, and the OS design is not degra

MOD PARENT UP!

I notice that, too. Also, Windows XP machines newly added to a Windows 98 peer-to-peer network have trouble seeing the Win 98 machines. Posting to official Microsoft newsgroups provides no answers to this quirky behavior. Of course, that may be because Chang, Li, Wu, Zhang and others have been told not to discuss it.

I put some of the fixes for quirkiness together so that I could ask Microsoft if there was anything I am missing: Possible Solutions to Slow Network Browsing or Inability to Connect. Some of the problems mentioned are obviously not the fault of Windows XP directly, but the fact that they often occur seems sometimes to be the fault of underlying sloppiness in Windows OS code.

Acronis TrueImage is a Linux-based Windows XP backup utility that never has any problem seeing all machines on a Windows peer-to-peer network.

I've also never had problems with Linux itself.