Dear reader,
As is already far and wide known, since Windows 8, the new trendy way of backup and recovery of files is the so called "File History", which is, to put it crudely, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Time Machine. It breaks the present System Backup and Recovery in such a way that both cannot be activated at the same time and the latter cannot be scheduled (unless you are a professional and know how to work with wbadmin and AT or schtasks). Just like thousands of other solutions (paid and free) it can save files on a local drive or on a NAS but unlike them its GUI representation of history is, well, simply put, ugly, it cannot sync to any other storage solutions, and cannot ADD folders (but you can exclude). And that’s all about it. It doesn’t leverage dedupe, sector deltas, slow WAN connections, it doesn’t have ANY added value what so ever.
And since – imagine that – I cannot even sign in with my Microsoft online account to comment directly (the first blog is closed for comments, the second asks for Twitter, Gmail or Facebook credentials!!!), decided to write my impressions as an open answer.
Here it goes:
Dear Steven Sinofsky, as you wrote "Protecting user files with File History",
(Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/10/protecting-user-files-with-file-history.aspx)
Dear Keith Mayer, as you wrote "Backup and Recovery of Windows 8 & Windows 8.1 – Tip-of-the-Day",
(Link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/09/17/backup-amp-recovery-of-windows-8-windows8-itpro-tipoftheday.aspx)
With all due respect, did Microsoft give away the shadow copy for a half-baked fruitlike file history, implementing a GUI with garlic odor?
I’ve spoken with many Time Machine users and all they admired was the simplicity: they didn’t need to take care where, how and even when copies are made as long as these copies were accessible, which worked. At home… What proved to be a pain in the neck for the most of them when MacBook Air was miles away from their beloved Time Capsule.
So instead of making the Shadow Copy more user friendly with a nice "History Preview" GUI and praise it over the competition for being autonomous (on the same disk & will ALWAYS be useful, even on the moon, blah, blah) you gave up all years of work for a petit bourgeois smelly NAS-copy solution, whereas in the same breath you crippled down (system) volume backup software INSTEAD of finally making incremental backups possible on shared folders?
Gee, you must be very proud of this blog post indeed.
May I kindly rely on your personal reference when I apply for any MS VP vacancy? I presume you’d agree with me that I’d be more useful than the average buddy there, right?
Thanks for nothing and welcome back!
Kind Regards