Barry Collins can’t believe that there’s still no decent way to back up a PC.
If you want to know what it’s like being a GP for a few seconds, ask someone how often they back up their PC. You'll get the same fictional bluster that a doctor gets every time they ask a patient how many units of alcohol they drink each week.
Nobody does back-up properly. No-one. Not me, not you, and especially not the internet business with £50 million of funding that I visited a few weeks back, which was basically relying on a few scattered hard drives and the London Fire Brigade responding within 10 seconds of an office blaze to safeguard its critical data.
Why do we take such ludicrous risks with our irreplaceable photos, documents and other digital files? Because back-up is too much effort. Sure, there are decent, paid-for packages out there, but they only back up a single PC to a local hard drive. What about your laptop, which spends its entire life in front of the sofa, nowhere near an external hard drive?
Online back-up solves some of these problems, but it's slow and expensive. I recently upgraded to a fibre connection and decided to back up around 500GB of photos and documents to the online back-up service Livedrive (www.livedrive .com). Not only will this cost me the thick end of £60 for a year but it took almost a month to complete the job, and I work from home with the computer running for around 10-12 hours a day! Most people simply won’t bother.
The various Windows heads at Microsoft ought to be slapped with a very large haddock for this. They've had donkey’s years and untold resources to solve the back-up problem - to make it painless and invisible to the user - but they haven’t. The File History back-up system in the latest version of Windows doesn’t even work with files stored on external hard drives; they have to be stored on the PC’s main drive. Given that many laptops these days come with tiny solid-state drives that hold only a fraction of most people’s files, Windows back-up is about as much use as a tub of hair gel is to Harry Hill.
The most galling thing is that Microsoft already has the perfect set-up to offer every Windows user pretty much bulletproof back-ups. Its Office 365 online office suite provides subscribers with a whopping 1TB (1,000GB) of space to store their files via OneDrive. However, OneDrive isn’t a back-up program but a service for syncing files across multiple machines.
It provides an element of back-up, but it won’t protect your external hard drives, it doesn’t offer a full system back-up, and you can’t restore from a certain point in time (say, before a serious malware infection).
And yet there's nothing stopping Microsoft making any of this possible. Imagine if Windows 10 automatically saved incremental back-ups of all your files, both locally to back-up hard drives and into that enormous cloud? So if your computer crashed or needed to be wiped clean after being infected, you could either restore it from a back-up drive or download the necessary data from the cloud, with Windows able to return any of your PCs to a previous state from any time over the past six months.
Free, painless back-ups: doesn’t that sound like a brilliant way to tempt us back to buying Windows again?