Backup Software with Vista

Ini bukan iklan, walaupun gue sangat recommend acronis true image.
Tp yg penting sih, gimana sih cara kerja sesungguhnya dari system
restore -- yg ternyata cm nyimpen last known good configuration. Bukan
backup data. Yg kl elo kehilangan data, yaa... Berarti wasallam...

Walaupun udah ada tools terbaru di vista, tp ternyata masih ada
kekurangannya. Penasaran khan..??

Trus, bagaimana dgn file yg di enkripsi ??? Nah lho

Lumayan seru kok wawancaranya.
Dibaca aja..

Original article on Let's Talk Computers website

Third Party Backup Software - Still Needed with Vista

Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton - Acronis Interview Host - Alan
Ashendorf on Let's Talk Computers, February 10, 2007

Alan: As more users mover to the new Vista Operating System, making sure
that all critical data is being backed up is more important than ever.
Our guest today, is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic
Marketing with Acronis. And welcome back to Let's Talk Computers,
Stephen.

Stephen: Thanks for having me back.

Alan: Anytime that we install something new on our computer system, we
really need to make sure that we have all of our critical data
completely backed up. And this is especially true when we are installing
is a new operating system, isn't it?

Stephen: It's not just adding a new operating system. The issue is
exactly the same if you are adding a new program. The issue is the same
if you are adding new hardware. Whenever you change a working system you
need to protect yourself in case something unusual happens. You might
have a power outage; you might have a bad driver. You never know. But,
anytime you change a system you should always back it up first.

Alan: If I get a brand program, let's say it's a new word processor and
I want to install it on my computer, the safest thing to do is to make a
back up before I install this new word processor because I really don't
know what the word processor is going to do to things that are already
on my computer. It may work just perfectly, but Murphy has a tendency to
pop up at the worst possible case and this will be no exception. It will
find something that won't be compatible.

Stephen: You know, I always thought that Murphy was an optimist. Things
will go wrong. They always do. In the case of upgrading from Windows XP
to Vista, there are so many more things that are changing. There are
just so many more possibilities of something going wrong.

Alan: You're looking at first of all, installing a new operating system,
which means the existing programs and hardware that you have on your
system may or may not work. Even though Microsoft has a compatibility
program that you run to tell you that everything is going to be fine -
there are some programs that still are not going to "play nice" with the
Operating System. And then, on top of that, even if you've got
everything working correctly, you're going to have programs that are
going to send out patches to make their program compatible with Vista
and you take a chance of something going wrong.

Stephen: We've all seen patches from all kinds of companies that have
gone out and didn't do what the software vendor thought it might.
There's so much that can possibly go wrong. You talked about the utility
that Microsoft tells you if your system is Vista compatible. I have a
laptop. I bought it late last year. I did run that utility on my laptop.
It found at least five potential issues with my laptop. You're talking
about an almost-new laptop. You're absolutely right. Having an image of
your machine in a known working state is terribly important. If anything
should possibly go wrong, all you do is restore the image. If nothing
else, you're back to where you were before you started and your machine
will work.

Alan: Microsoft has a process called "System Restore". Why can't we rely
on the system' snapshots and then use that to restore us back to a known
state? Why do we need to go out and buy a third party software program
like Acronis True Image 10 Home in order to back us up? Why can't we use
what comes with the operating system?

Stephen: Let's talk about System Restore for a moment. System Restore is
designed to return the operating system back to a known good working
state. It's not designed to restore your data. So, if there's a problem;
let's say there is a virus or if there is a bad patch, you can use
System Restore to bring your operating system back in time. But, if you
have damaged any of your programs, any of your configuration files, your
data, System Restore won't help you there.

With the launch of Vista, Microsoft has also introducing something
called Complete PC, which is an imaging program similar to Acronis True
Image. But again, it's very rudimentary. It will not do for example,
incremental or differential images. It creates a single image and that's
the image you have. You can go back to that image or your can again,
create another single image.

But with a third party product, such as Acronis True Image, we give you
the ability to set points in time. So, you can go back to your last full
image backup. Let's say that you make an incremental each day of the
week. You might just want to go back to Thursday or Wednesday of last
week. There are a lot more flexibility with third-party products than
you get with the capabilities that are built into the Operating System.

Alan: Now, you mentioned two buzzwords - "incremental" and
"differential". What are they when would I use one over the other?

Stephen: Let's say you've made a full backup on Sunday night. Then,
Monday night you make an incremental backup. You're saving all the
changes that have been made since your last full backup. On Tuesday, you
make another incremental backup. Now, you're saving the changes since
your last incremental backup. So, you are saving one day's change,
again. On Wednesday if you do another incremental, you are saving one
day's change.

A differential backup will save all of the changes since your last full
backup. So, you might an in incremental on Monday and Tuesday and
Wednesday. Thursday, you do a differential backup and basically, what
you are doing is that you're taking all of those incrementals and
putting them into one new image backup. So, you're only managing at this
point, two files instead of three or four.

It's really a very file management of backing up your hard disk. It's a
management technique that's actually used in enterprises, quite often -
where they combine incremental and differential images to save various
points in time.

Alan: I've seen so many horror stories with clients that do incremental
backups only. And they will do a full backup on a tape and then they
will do incremental backups and then they will do an incremental for
this day and this day, and this day and they may have forty different
incremental backups. Well, when you get ready to restore, not only do
you have to have the original full backup, you have to have every
incremental from there on. If you lose one tape or one gets damaged,
what happens?

Stephen: If you lose one component of that set (one incremental backup),
essentially, you have lost the entire backup. And that's very, very
frustrating. That's why many companies will use a combination of
incremental and differential backups.

In the case of the home user, if you do full backup a week, maybe a
couple of incremental backups during the week, chances are you are not
changing that much information and you're probably going to be okay. If
you're in a corporate setting there's just no reason not to do
differential backups to reduce the number of files that your have to
manage.

Alan: Let's get serious for a minute. I know in a corporation you have
guidelines and if you don't follow the guidelines, you can get fired.
But in a home environment, the odds of somebody backing up every single
week is just not going to happen. I know people that haven't backed up
in a year.

Stephen: If you have to manually back up everything, you're absolutely
right. People don't like to go and do repetitive tasks. The best way of
handling this is just to schedule the task so it happens automatically.
With Acronis True Image there's an icon on the main screen, called
Schedule a Task. And you can click there and you can tell your machine
every Sunday night at 11:00 at night I want to create a full image. And
then on say, Tuesday and Thursday I want incremental images. And
automatically, your system will do that backup.

Let's say you have a home where you have more than one computer, tied to
a network. It's extremely common these days, where students will each
have their own PC and maybe the parents will share a PC. Or you can be
crazy like me and just have multiple PC's in your house, just because
you want them. We also offer a product called Acronis True Image
Workstation. With the Workstation product, you could put a very small
program on each of the PC's, called an Agent and from one system, you
can manage the backups of all the PC's on your network - and tell each
PC at a given time to do its backup image and you don't even have to go
out and touch those PC's to do it.

Alan: From the home environment, I can set up an automatic schedule that
says, "I'm going to back up everything that's on my hard drive to either
a network or to a disk." In the past, I would have to bounce into DOS,
which basically means that defeats the purpose of the automatic backup,
because now I'm not in Windows, anymore.

Stephen: Well, that's the great thing about Acronis True Image. Because
we live in Windows all of the imaging is done as a background task. You
can continue to work in Windows, while Acronis True Image is making its
backup image. There's no interruption to the workflow. You don't even
know it's happening. Even if it's happening on a scheduled basis - maybe
you're up late on a Sunday night and you're working and 11:00 comes and
your machine says, "It's time to do a backup". No problem. You won't
even know it's happening. It doesn't even slow down the machine.

Alan: What about open files? You have the registry; you have system
files that are locked because the operating system locks them for
security reasons. How do you back those up?

Stephen: The way Acronis True Image works: When the time comes to start
a backup, we empty all of the data that might be in the cache on your
machine, (cache being data stored in ram or on your hard disk in a
cache). We stop the machine for a brief moment in time and we take a
snap shot of every sector on the disk, (every "1" and every "0"). When
we freeze the machine even the open files are frozen for a moment and we
collect the one 1's and 0's that are on the hard disk. We re-start the
machine; you continue to work. It happens so fast that as I say, you
don't even know that it's happening. But, the software is able to record
all the 1's and 0's. That's what we write to our disk image.

So, you don't have to worry. Even if you have data on your machine that
maybe you have in an "encrypted" file. Maybe this is your work machine
and this is corporate date and the data is encrypted. The data again, is
still stored as 1's and 0's. When that image is created, all those open
files are saved in what's called, "their state", so if they every have
to be restored, the machine comes right back to the moment that that
image made and all of your encrypted files remain - encrypted.

Alan: So, there's no reason whatsoever, as a home user that I have to
not back up my computer systems' multiple hard drives if I need to. You
can handle all that for me, behind the scenes, automatically?

Stephen: We can handle it all, we can handle it automatically. And most
importantly, it's every economical. Remember - your data, your pictures,
your music, your videos are going to far outlast the life of your
hardware. You're going to have to make changes to your hardware before
you make changes to your data. And we can save these images of your
machine. These images are transportable to new hardware, even if your
hardware dies.

Alan: If we want to find more information about the Acronis True Image
10 Home, where would we go?

Stephen: You can come to www.acronis.com

Alan: Steve, as always, it's been our pleasure to have you as our guest
here on Let's Talk Computers, talking about how we can back up so that
we don't lose our data. And we look forward to having you on the air
again, next time.

Stephen: It's always a pleasure to come in and visit with you and your
listeners. Thanks, so much.