Tag: Backup
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Cloning or Restoring a drive also restores bad block list!
When you clone or restore a drive, for example when replacing an HDD with and SSD or doing a restore from a Veeam backup you also copy over the list of bad blocks from the old drive. Chkdsk will report no errors but Veeam (or other backup software might). To fix this run, chkdsk /b…
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[Fixed] Error Using Veeam Agent for Windows Free with a NAS
I have previously blogged about how to back-up home systems to commercial standards. A useful tool for the home user is Veeam Agent for Windows Free. It allows you to make a recovery disk and system image and has a very reliable restore feature. In the small office/home (SoHo) environment the back-up target will typically…
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New year – annual backups
If, dear reader, you have been following my advice on backups then you will, be using OneDrive to sync your Documents to the cloud. This gives you a real-time copy of everything in case you use your laptop and the ability to access documents from many devices. be using File History with a big NAS…
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How long does it take to reset Windows 10?
My own laptop has broken so I needed to borrow a new one from work. I took a pre-used Microsoft Surface 3. After I had transferred my data and applications it began behaving strangely. I ran and found that there were errors. Therefore I decided to reset the Microsoft Surface 3. “Reset” is a feature…
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How to restore a Surface image
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have recently published a definitive guide to backing up your home computer in which I say that home users should not rely on System Images for system backup because restoring them is so unreliable. This does not apply to corporate users who often purchase large numbers…
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The definitive guide to backing up your home computer
Readers of this blog will know that backup, or more pertainately, restore has been a regular theme. I use my laptop everyday for work and when as is the case every few years the hard drive or motherboard fails then it usually costs me several days labour and stress to get up and working again.…
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Backing up a virtual machine to the cloud
Any virtual machine will be large, probably >10 GB and it changes regularly. To back it up to the cloud I would ideally use a block level back-up solution. That way only the changes get synced up. The catch is that a block level back-up solution needs an agent at both ends and as far…
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Vagrant and Chocolatey can script setting up Windows environments
In an earlier post I suggested that development environments should be virtual machines and I will probably run mine in Virtualbox 5.0 because this now supports all hypervisors including Hyper-V on appropriate Windows platforms (Pro or Enterprise). Virtualbox is also the preferred target of Vagrant which we will discuss below. Virtual machines can be copied…
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How to backup data to OneDrive in “real-time”
I am setting up my daughter’s laptop for university. As a student she can purchase Microsoft 365 University edition for a small price for 4 years. This comes with 1 TB cloud storage called OneDrive. This is highly available, redundant storage that should be utilised as much as possible. When planning backup schemes we need…
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Windows 8.1 is Android Kitkat and other thoughts
— Update 2016-01-03 read about my new approach to backup — My daughter is going to university and has just bought a Lenovo laptop which has Windows 8.1 installed. It is a conventional 15.6″ laptop with a i5 processor, 8 GB RAM and 1TB hard disk. First impressions This is my first use of Windows…
Dr James Bayley 