With the
increased threat of ransomware and hacks of systems I thought it timely to
examine backups and explore exactly what is meant by this often misunderstood
word in the tech world. It is vital you understand, no matter what device we
are talking about, what the different type of backups mean and how they can be
used to recover from the many pitfalls which can befall any device.
Factory Recovery Backups
If you have
ever purchased a laptop or desktop computer in the past the option to create
recovery media was presented to you. In many cases I find that either this was
never done or the original media has long disappeared into the some space or
location we can’t remember.
Factory
Restore Backups(FRB) are vital to create. I cannot over emphasize this fact. If
you have a serious issue with your pc it can mean the difference between
dumping the pc and repairing it. This is even more true on windows 8 and
Windows 10 machines where the Windows product license is no longer printed on a
sticker on the machine but is embedded in the hard coded memory (bios) of the
machine. Incidentally if you own a windows 7 machine don’t be tempted to peel
or scratch this sticker off and if it is wearing take a good quality photo of
it and store it with your Factory recovery media.
Caveats On Factory Recovery Backups
There a few
caveats with Factory Recovery backups that you should be aware of:
#1 Never use the FRB without consulting a
qualified technician.
This is one
of the most common mistakes I come across. FRB’s are the very last option to be employed when you run into
trouble on a computer not the first. Restoring a computer to factory default
installation with an underlining problem can result in the machine being
unusable. I see it most often being employed to attempt to fix a machine that
has slowed to a crawl. In many cases this is caused by a hardware issue. A FBR
will NOT correct a hardware error but it will in some cases paper over it for a
period and in many cases the next fail of the system will be catastrophic.
#2 Factory Recovery Backups can wipe your hard
drive.
I never do
a factory recovery unless I am completely satisfied I have ALL of the users
data secured. I simply will not take the chance of the recovery backing up the
data on the hard drive (which may be faulty) and then restoring it. You must
backup your system and data before you attempt to use this feature.
Incidentally most qualified technicians won’t even work on your original drive
when using these backups. We clone the drive and work off the cloned drive to
ensure if anything goes wrong we can start over.
I will
continue on this topic in my next article.
Oliver Reidy is a computer technician and has been in the industry since 1981.You
can contact him via email at help.desk@reidyonline.com or at the telephone numbers listed on this page. This article, and all
previous articles, are available to view online at http://reidyonline.blogspot.ie/
or www.reidyonline.com/blogspot.htm
