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45638
March 11th, 2014 15:00
Question about Dell Backup and Recovery Premium
Still searching for a conventional way to backup the tablet (5130) and have the ability to boot into a recovery environment and restore it from a backup. Has anyone tried B & R Premium? Supposedly will do just that... Can anyone shed some light? Thanks
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St. Lamar
157 Posts
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March 14th, 2014 20:00
Personally, I wouldn't. I'm sure that it works just fine, but the recovery options from Vista and Windows 7 are still in Windows 8.1.
You can make a USB recovery flash drive to reset your device to factory standard (out of the box) in Windows. (A 8 GB flash drive will work.)
You can back up an entire system image to external storage such as a 100 GB or so USB hard drive.
The recovery USB mounts a Windows Recovery environment with multiple options. These include repairing the drive from the recovery partition image on the USB stick itself or from the recovery partition on the hard drive, if that partition wasn't deleted (to make some space after creating the USB flash drive - it's an option that's offered), or recreate the entire drive from an system image on an attached external hard drive.
Booting off the USB flash drive works the same way using a bootable DVD or CD did in previous versions of Windows. It mounts the familiar Recovery Environment and starts by asking for your keyboard details.
There are a few steps involved, and you need to remember to MAKE the backups (or schedule the backups in Task Scheduler to make them repetitive.) Windows 8 will only create one backup on a small external hard drive (say 100 MB) and will overwrite it each time a backup is made. On a much bigger hard drive, it will use up to 30% of the hard drive space and keeping as many system images as it can, then replacing the oldest with the newest. In other words, you can keep more system images on a 1 TB external than you can on a 100 GB external. (That would be about 300 MB of system images on the 1 TB.)
If you want to try this (and why not, it's free, assuming you already have a flash drive and an external USB hard drive) start out this way.
Create the USB recovery flash drive. Swipe in Charms and Search for the exact phrase "recovery drive." Select "Create a recovery drive." In the dialog, check []Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive" (if it's not greyed out, that is). Run through that process and you'll end up with a bootable USB flash drive that can mount a Rescue Environment. (You may need to go into the BIOS and set up the flash drive as your first boot device in order to test it.)
Create a system image for backup of the entire hard drive by swiping in Charms and searching for the exact phrase "file history." Select "Save backup copies of your files with File History." This page takes a while to load. When it loads, find "System Image Backup" in the lower left corner.
Are there disadvantages of this compared to using the Dell premium service? There must be or they wouldn't charge for it. :emotion-11: I haven't studied up on it (because I'm old and stuck in my ways and I stick with what works for me), but I imagine it automates things a bit and has a cloud backup component. It may even happen seamlessly in the background. I don't know.
Anyway, Bob, I hope this helps.
St. Lamar
157 Posts
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March 15th, 2014 18:00
Hi, Bob. I'm glad it worked for you. Sometimes the tried and true stuff is comforting, even if it's not likely to be needed.
I was thinking about what iGetThis said- about having a USB backup that will restore the factory disk and backing up just the important stuff online. That's a valid way to handle things, of course.
Last night I was reading about MMC, or "multimedia cards." It's been a few years since I've seen an SD card or other flash drive described that way. Then I noticed that "eMMC" such as the "hard drives" in little tablets was included in the standard. Rather than an SSD, our devices actually have flash memory, like an SD card, mounted in a BGA (ball-grid array) and soldered directly onto the motherboard. Now all I'm saying is that I've thrown away quite a few SD and CF cards that quit working over the years... Maybe having a full backup is a GOOD THING. But then again, if the drive fails utterly, the only way to restore our backup will be with a new motherboard.
We are in effect betting that something better/faster/fancier will come along before these things start to fail.
I have a ThinkPad and a Palm Lifedrive (big Palm with a spinning 4 GB hard drive) that were made in 2005, and both of them are still working.
Bobmitmen
429 Posts
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March 14th, 2014 17:00
Bobmitmen
429 Posts
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March 14th, 2014 21:00
iGetThis
184 Posts
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March 15th, 2014 11:00
For me the old way of creating backups are long gone. Di I really need a full backup of my entire HDD? In my opinion no. All I need to create one time is the recovery bootable USB stick. You can get a 8GB stick for that around $5 or less. My important files are always backed up or better said synced to a cloud. Microsoft gave 10GG of free space for life which is enough for me (for important files).
For files that are not that important like software downloads that can always be redone again I just use a 3TB network Personal Cloud storage. All my systems are setup to use it and if needed and had to do a system restore install the driver and bang the data is right back. A lot or most of the software that comes with cloud allows you to also do backups from your system and not just sync files. I like the sync process better because if needed you have access to everything from any device you own.
But that are just my 2 cents and I am running very good with that approach for years.
St. Lamar
157 Posts
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March 15th, 2014 12:00
This should be helpful:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/software-os/f/4677/t/19471699.aspx
Bobmitmen
429 Posts
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March 15th, 2014 16:00
Bobmitmen
429 Posts
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March 16th, 2014 08:00
JToering
113 Posts
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May 19th, 2014 09:00
I have read the only explanation of the Dell Backup and Recovery that I could find on the web http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/software-os/f/4677/t/19471699.aspx , and after reading it, and working with it, I still have no idea. There is no up-to-date .PDF documentation for it on the web, and the help system of the app states the obvious as to what to put in each field. I've also gone through the YouTube videos which cover one item at a time, with no overall scheme. Entirely missing is whether or not it knows how to automatically manage disk space so it can be a set-and-forget setup that I can use for non-technical users. The only thing I've done successfully is made an image backup of the factory install to a USB flash drive. The thread in the above link has a table included here that contrasts Dell Backup and Recovery with Microsoft 8.1 backup, but contradicts what you say about Windows 8.1 backup is capable of. Does this table make any of this make sense to you? Point 2 is the only one that makes sense to me, and I'm not certain that it is simpler.
Backup
backup instance
Interface
latest instance
pack release
What I see so far with Microsoft, Dell, and Novastor, is there is no difference in capabilities. From the looks of it, the backup files they produce will all be the same. It appears that the difference is ONLY the interface. I'm not implying that isn't valuable, but it appears one would be required to move to something like ShadowProtect to gain additional functionality, such as mounting backups, converting backups to VMs, etc. However, ShadowProtect is not self-managing with regard to disk space, and not a set-and-forget system.
Thanks!
JToering
113 Posts
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May 20th, 2014 21:00
The Dell backup documentation relies on you knowing the Microsoft backup. You cannot get question answered about it, so there must be precious few using Dell Backup and Recovery Premium. ShadowProtect is a thing of beauty, but not self-managing. After thorough looking through what is out there, there was only one to pick from, and that is Rebit 6 Standard. It works on the same principle as ShadowProtect except:
1. ShadowProtect's consolidation and retention is time based, leaving you no guarantee that you won't run out of space. Rebit is disk space driven, and automatically trims the old files to make room as necessary.
2. ShadowProtect takes a full backup, and then snapshot off from that. Rebit also does that, and will do at least 1 snapshot per 24 hours, but adds file history as well. As it trims itself back due to disk space constraints, it determines which snapshots and file versions are no longer relevant, and automatically eliminates them.
3. ShadowProctect requires understanding to monitor. With Rebit, the little green frog changes color when something is not right.
4. ShadowProtect does not allow you to switch drives to rotate off site. Rebit does allow you to rotate drives at any time, and figures out what is missing. It does not get confused.
5. ShadowProtect can do hardware independent restores. Rebit has the same limitations as a Windows backup to where the destination drive must be equal to, or larger than the backup.
6. ShadowProtect backups can be mounted at any snapshot point to retrieve an old file. It has the appearance of the file system as of the time of the backup. Thus, you need to know the time period you need a file from. Rebit shows all of the changes of the file system merged into one view, which means all of the files, deleted or not, from the entire history are there. The upside is you can double-click a file, and see all of the dates and times, and double-click any instance, and bring it up in the application it goes with, to determine which is the best version you want, without having to know the date an time of what you are after.
7. ShadowProtect backups you can turn into VMs. You cannot do that with Rebit.
8. Windows Backup file history and Dell Backup and Restore file history only record version for files that are in your libraries. Rebit keeps track of changes on any file except certain types such as virtual machine files, and the user can add more. However, all files are backed up by the base image and snapshots.
9. Rebit is the only product that requires no configuration after installation.
10. With Rebit, you can format the backup drive and it will start a new backup chain and start backing up automatically. It is self-healing.
St. Lamar
157 Posts
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May 22nd, 2014 00:00
And just a few points about Windows own backup, if you don't mind.I'll step through the process of making a fresh backup.
First of all, I have my portable backup drive spinning. It's something like 120 GB or so. With the Dell, I plug the drive into power as the Dell can't provide the power to spin it through the OTG adapter.
Windows 8 sort of hides it, but it's the same old shadow copies that have been around since Vista. Search for "file history" and it should open /control panel/all control panel items/file history.
It informs me that "File history is off." It's showing the hard drive with 132 GB free under "Copy files to..." (I have one complete image backup on the drive already.)
At the bottom left is a link that says "System Image Backup." It says "Where do you want to save the backup?" Then it's hurry up and wait again will it does the same scan and identifies the same target.
Gee, I haven't done this since 3/24/2014!
Click Next, and it informs me that it will back up:
Click Next. It reminds me that although the hard drive is encrypted, the backup image will not be.
I click on "Start Backup."
It's interesting to note that a system image can be "mounted" read-only and navigated in order to grab individual files or folders out of it. Microsoft has never emphasized this, but it can be done under Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Action - Attach VHD does the deed.
So what do I plan to do if I ever actually need to RESTORE one of these backups? If all else fails, I'll use the emergency flash drive I created under Windows. It's on a old 8 GB flash drive. With it hooked up to the Dell (and USB boot enabled in the BIOS), it boots to the old, familiar Recovery options.
And I'll mention why I'm not too enthused about backing up this device. The "hard drive" is really flash memory that is soldered to the motherboard. That means that changing the hard drive entails changing the motherboard. Since some motherboard malfunction, any motherboard malfunction, requires a new motherboard, I think I'd most likely just get another tablet and set it up.
I don't keep any important information on my Dell that I can't afford to lose, but Windows 8.1 is certainly capable of creating a system image and restoring it to a hard drive.
It's still cranking over backing up the image. I'm waiting to see if it offers to create a "system repair disk."
Anyway, one of the startup options the Dell has is actually "System Recovery"
If you have a keyboard attached, you can enter it from Windows by holding SHIFT and clicking the power icon and selecting restart.
So that's three ways you can still enter recovery to restore an externally backed up system image.
Windows 7, by default, would only use 30% of the target hard drive for backups if the drive was much larger than the images. I haven't found a similar setting in Windows 8.1, so I'm letting it have the entire portable drive to use as it sees fit.
The backup has completed, and it did not offer to create the recovery disk. I guess that's only the first time you see it.