
Windows 8.1’s user-hostile backup story - edandersen
http://www.edandersen.com/2013/09/15/windows-8-1s-user-hostile-backup-story/
======
Karunamon
@drivebyacct

I have given 8 a shot. You know what I've decided? That Microsoft's ideas on
UI design are about as good as their ideas on advertising (i.e. head-
scratching at best and migrane inducing at worst)

I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop
trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching
applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired. Yes, I know this can be
disabled. The fact that it's on, and the default, is the problem. (If you're
wondering what the problem is, it's that there's no difference from a "swipe"
gesture and just moving your mouse from left to right across the pad)

Same with the whole start screen business which has been discussed ad nauseum
elsewhere. Suffice to say, its information density is low, its disruption to
whatever you're doing is high.

And then there's this Microsoft account malarky that they shove down your
throat at every other turn. I 'm already using an OS which more likely than
not has backdoors for the TLAs, made by a company that admits they give new
vulnerabilities to said TLAs before fixing them. I am sure as _HELL_ not going
to make logging onto my system reliant on some random cloud service!

Whatever tangible benefits 8 has over 7 do not at this point tilt the
cost/benefit ratio enough in that direction for me to shell out the roughly
~$1000 it would cost to up(down?)grade my 7 enterprise infrastructure.

*ed

I really wish you'd get a real account that isn't dead. It's impossible to
respond to you.

~~~
AaronFriel
> I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop
> trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching
> applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired.

Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver
that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture. That was probably added
by Synaptic, or the OEM of your laptop, and you should disable the gesture and
probably let the OEM know that including that gesture was insane.

The rest of your complaints are, well, I think they're overstated, but I can't
argue with how using the OS "feels" to someone. If you think it feels poorly
done, me telling you your feelings are wrong is not going to get us anywhere.
But at least factually, you should know that some of your assertions might be
rooted in what OEMs have done to add crap to Windows 8.

~~~
Scene_Cast2
Tested this on vanilla Win8. Swiping from "beyond" the right edge of the
trackpad to ~1cm left from the right edge opens the Charms menu (same thing as
Win+C shortcut or doing the same gesture on the touchscreen). Similar results
(app switching) happen when swiping from the left edge.

This is a built-in Win8 feature, not a custom driver feature. The gesture
recognition is quite decent though, so I've never had these gestures activate
accidentally.

~~~
AaronFriel
It sounded like the author was referring to a (very real) feature of Synaptic
trackpads that performs app switching via the trackpad.

------
wintersFright
8.1 also heavily pushes logging on with a Microsoft Account. 8.0 had a small
print option to use a local account but that is gone now and you have to
submit a bad email/password combo 3 times before it gives in and lets you
setup a local account.

I'll stick to a local account per machine thanks very much. Would rather not
have MS holding the keys on whether I can logon to my own machine or not, nor
give them free big data for onselling to marketers.

~~~
harrytuttle
Not true. Total FUD.

you click create account, then select local account at the bottom.

Enterprise edition also doesn't prompt for a Microsoft account.

~~~
m_ram
I installed the RTM x64 Pro version in a VM a few days ago and it did not have
an option for local account. I had to Google around to find out how to bypass
it. After installation, when you create additional accounts, it does give you
the option to use local.

~~~
be5invis
Just disconnect internet during installation.

(and under most cases during installing an OS, the internet is not avaliable)

~~~
m_ram
You're right that this is a good option for people who care, but most won't
bother. Windows 8.1 will have most drivers for ethernet and wireless cards
which means that the majority of people will be connecting to the Internet
before creating a user account. This is a very good strategy for Microsoft to
maximize the number of Windows installations connected to their online
services. A marketing or sales person would spin this around and say that it's
good for users because they'll get to experience Windows connected to the
cloud without having to jump through any hoops after installation.

------
sprior
The really sad part is that at least somebody at Microsoft once knew how
backup was supposed to work. Windows Home Server backed up every Windows
machine in your house over the network to the central server. It was a bare
metal recovery type differential backup, the backups were aged rationally, and
the machines were woken up in the middle of the night to perform the backup,
but laptops would only do this if they were plugged into AC so you wouldn't
wake up a laptop in a suitcase and drain the battery and burn up the machine
because it had no cooling airspace. It was pretty damn perfect (OK, a couple
of minor issues), one of the best products Microsoft has ever produced.

So of course they screwed up the next version so bad that all the OEMs dropped
their products that were based on it and Microsoft killed the product.

~~~
chinpokomon
I was burned on more than one occasion by the "RAID" disk volume getting
corrupted. As much as I liked Windows Home Server, I was really hoping the
next release would have improved their drive volume manager, rather than just
killing off the product.

------
zmmmmm
I truly don't understand what MS finds so hard about backup. What people want
is so simple and obvious - a separate copy of all their files, preferably
their whole system image, somewhere else. And yet every version of Windows
seems to screw around with it. I remember Vista came out and I thought a great
way to migrate would be to do a full system backup and then I could restore
back the personal files I wanted onto Vista. Nope - the backup system totally
changed, the utiltity to restore files didn't even ship with Vista! I was left
to manually use an old XP computer to extract and copy files across from my
backup image.

Then Win7 came and I started using the backup option there. But even with the
full drive image I didn't quite trust it, so I also made intermittent backups
using Macrium Reflect which creates a low level image of each partition. So
then came the day when my wife chose the "recover my pc" from the boot menu
and wiped everything. "No problem!" I thought, I will just Google how to
restore a full system image to bare metal. Imagine my shock to discover that
this is not a feature of Windows backup. Unless you make a "recovery disk"
using a CD (this computer did not have a CD drive), you cannot reinstall a
full system image!? So I installed from the Macrium partition image and it
delightfully brought back our system in a matter of minutes.

I've never been able to work out if this consistent incompetence is by design
(to keep the industry of alternative backup solutions alive and avoid
accusations of monoply / antitrust) or if they have some strategic or tactical
reason to make sure noboby on windows manages to back up their computers (hey,
20% of all users who corrupt their hard drive just buy a new computer!)

Whatever the reason, it is exacty this sort of thing that is driving regular
consumers away from Windows and into the arms of Apple. I hope MS figures it
out, because I am not fond of Apple either.

------
ygra
Random question: What would be a good backup option for Windows? Even Windows
7's backup option was often unusable, failing backups with strange errors or
taking two days to complete so I'm not too sad to see it gone completely. I'm
just missing a useful alternative. File History is nice for accidentally lost
files, but for restoring a working state of the machine there are probably
better options.

~~~
david-keepvault
I work for KeepVault Online Backup and we've heard similar feedback from
customers regarding Windows built-in backup solution.

Our software provides both local and cloud-based backup. If you only need
local backup to an external, you can sign up for a free KeepVault trial
account and use the local backup forever. KeepVault Pro also provides
versioning, so a file corruption or deletion isn't going to wipe your backups.

KeepVault backups are also fully encrypted end-to-end and incremental.

[http://www.keepvault.com](http://www.keepvault.com)

~~~
ygra
For a purely local backup (I rsync my NAS to a datacenter myself) KeepVault
seems unnecessarily complicated, as I have to get an account and I cannot seem
to make a local backup to a network share/drive (I only see local drives in
the selection).

------
twiceaday
I am staying on 7 as long as I can. I get the impression that 7 is the new XP.

~~~
devx
Windows 7 will be the last good "desktop OS" from Microsoft. They're going to
completely kill the desktop mode in future versions, slowly but surely. They
will turn it into DOS, where the desktop is but a fading "app", and will bury
it deep inside the Metro mode. I'm almost certain they will do this.

There are rumors that with Windows 10 and beyond they will also try to turn
Windows's license model into a _subscription model_ , which will completely
kill Windows for just about any "regular consumer", and will turn it into a
mostly enterprise OS, because only the enterprise customers will (probably)
agree to that kind of model.

Consumers already believe Windows is "free" with their laptop purchase, and
that they don't have to pay anything else after that. A subscription model
will be a huge turn off for consumers, not matter how little it costs (even $1
per month).

We can only hope that before Windows 7 gets too long in the tooth, Ubuntu or
some other multi-OEM OS (Android? Chrome OS?) will become popular enough in
the mainstream, and mature enough, to make it a viable alternative five years
down the road (I think they will be).

~~~
bcoates
Unlikely. Metro software is extremely thin on the ground, and there's no
indication that this is changing in the near term. Microsoft has a long, long
history of goofball widget UIs (Active Desktop, Sidebar Gadgets, Metro,
various Shell plugin technologies, and to a lesser extent MMC and control
panel applets). Each in turn has had its moment in the sun before being
marginalized or removed outright.

------
chris_wot
I can't believe that Microsoft would be so irresponsible for propagating the
myth that file mirroring is the same as file backup! What an absolute recipe
for disaster.

------
ladzoppelin
Yea this blog is wrong because they just removed the backup GUI. You can do a
backup and image using powershell commands just like past Windows versions.

~~~
cico71
The GUI for system image is back in the final RTM version
[http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-use-
system-...](http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-use-system-image-
backup) (also confirmed by multiple friends already on RTM)

~~~
edandersen
This doesn't automatically do it on a schedule.

~~~
cico71
Can't really comment as I'm still on 8.0. For me it's enough that it's still
there and can be scheduled as a PowerShell command (for files history I use
Crashplan anyway) but I agree that if this is the case, it's pretty much
hostile for consumer users.

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MichaelApproved
How do they get away with including SkyDrive in the OS without having
companies like Dropbox up in arms? Maybe that's why they're calling it backup,
since backup is arguably part of an operating system and has existed (albeit
in other forms) on previous versions of Windows.

~~~
halfninety
How do Apple get away with including iCloud in the OS without having companies
like Dropbox up in arms? And they do call it "sync".

~~~
manojlds
Bigger thing is how iOS has only one browser that can be default and how other
browsers can never be as powerful as Apple's. how is apple getting away with
it, despite MS being punished for just installing a browser in their OS. Yeah
MS is more of a monopoly in desktops, but Apple monopolizes iOS if we see it
that way.

~~~
easyfrag
Every company "monopolizes" their own products - the problem for consumers
begins when there's only one de facto product in a particular market (e.g. -
desktop or smartphone OS). iOS is certainly not in that position in smartphone
OS and it can be argued that Windows is no longer as dominant as it was during
the antitrust trial.

------
alexchamberlain
Dropbox allows you to recover past versions of files; does SkyDrive allow you
to do the same?

~~~
ruqkus
Yes, this post is very misleading. SkyDrive features both a recycle bin for
deleted files and a version history option to restore from a previous copy.

~~~
Livven
The version history option is only available for Office files (.docx, .xlsx
etc.), plus even if it applied to all files a local backup can still be
useful. Forcefully disabling local file history for SkyDrive simply doesn't
make any sense... there's no technical reason for it, and it neither benefits
the user nor Microsoft or anybody else.

~~~
jervisfm
Yep, I just tested with a simple txt file and the changes were not versioned.
New modifications were made permanently without ability to go back to a prior
version of the text file. It does support versioning for office docs as you
stated though.

------
harrytuttle
This article is idiotic: Cloud _synchronisation_ is not backup. If you think
that, you are a wally, despite the vendor's promises.

This is a new feature they have added that allows sync between devices. It
doesn't stop any of the old ways of doing stuff from working other than
windows backup which was a piece of shit that didn't work properly anyway.

Sync is always notoriously problematic at the best of times so YMMV always
with that approach.

Realistically, most people just drag stuff to a USB stick periodically and
that's good enough for backup. That's how it really works.

~~~
edandersen
OP here, I think I said it several times that SkyDrive is _not_ a backup
system, despite MS trying to claim it is.

~~~
harrytuttle
If you read their terms and conditions they say it's not a backup system as
well.

People really need to read the SLAs etc.

~~~
chris_wot
I think you might have missed the point of what the author was saying. Check
out the screenshot he posted:

[http://www.edandersen.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/image.p...](http://www.edandersen.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/image.png)

Notice it says that your files are "automatically backed up to the cloud"?

~~~
harrytuttle
Yes i saw that. It's true, but its not a substitute for a backup setvice. If
it was, they wouldn't have the discontinuation of service and disclaimers in
their T&C.

~~~
pessimizer
But you can understand how people could confuse "automatically backed up" and
'automatic backup', right?

------
mohas
I neither use skydrive nor windows backup, but the article had good point,
saying skydrive is not a backup option on their terms and conditions to avoid
legal problems, but then saying it will backup your files in the user
interface, which one do you think people will see most? I like a software when
it clearly says its purpose and don't confuse its users

------
Aardwolf
You want to back up your personal files, not your OS. How can an OS make
backup user hostile? Write your files to several external disks that you keep
in different places, and maybe some online service, and that's it.

------
NateDad
So.... spend 5 bucks a month and get a real backup service?

I get that it's underhanded for Microsoft to call this backup when it's just
sync.... but honestly, for 99% of people, that's better than the nothing they
have now.

~~~
kmfrk
Seems like plain old upsale, a little similar to Apple's pricing for extra
storage on iCloud.

------
jeromeparadis
I don't bother with backups on Windows or Mac since I made the wise decision
to backup every computer, Mac or PC using Crashplan to NAS and cloud.

I would have once been mad with this Microsoft feature removal. However, I've
come to realize than neither Microsoft's or Apple's backup solutions
satisfactory for my needs. Time machine is arguably better... until it decides
to stop working. Since I've been on CrahPlan, no problems on any computer.
I've had one laptop that shorted since then and it was easy enough to recover
my files.

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WalterBright
Really, most Windows apps are bad at backup, and it's not Microsoft's fault.
Even Thunderbird is bad at it - what's wrong with a menu item called "backup"
and "restore"?

Most apps fail because they store crucial data in various undocumented
directories, plus the system registry. Even worse, some like to store critical
data in hidden directories.

Backing up an app and its data, and restoring, on Windows should be as simple
as a single xcopy command.

------
vitd
Did anyone else find it disturbing how the dialog box telling you about
SkyDrive tries to hide the fact that you don't actually need to use it by make
the "Don't Use SkyDrive" button not a button but clickable text? The vast
majority of users will not even see the clickable text, and of those who do,
they'll think it's not clickable, ensuring that millions of people will sign
up for the service, even if they don't want it.

------
peterkelly
I'm going hold off on Windows 8 for as long as I can. For now I'm sticking
with OS X and time machine.

------
frank_boyd
For those who've missed it: [http://prism-break.org/](http://prism-break.org/)
has a few alternative OSes.

Personally, I've been on Ubuntu for about 8 years. I have never regretted it.
But the more time passes, the less I regret it, if you know what I mean.

~~~
harrytuttle
Yes, download a new OS and Tor. That'll surely protect the network layer
between X and Y!!!

~~~
northwest
Are you smoking again?

