For the release of both Mac OS X Tiger (10.4 – 2005) and Max OS X Leopard (10.5 – 2007), Apple had various mocking campaigns and posters for the preceding conferences with slogans along the lines of:
Redmond, start your photocopiers
This was a very public and very open jibe from Apple regarding Microsoft’s reputation for simply copying features from Mac OS X. Now, I don’t want to really get into the “you’re a fanboy – no, you’re a fanboy!” style argument, but I do want to suggest that given the recent debacle that’s started to surface over the abysmal performance of the Windows 7 backup process, Microsoft appears to be cutting their noses off to spite their faces.
Back on 6 March 2009, I covered just how amazing Time Machine was as an OS-integrated backup product. I never said it was something that would replace enterprise products like NetWorker, but I did say:
This, quite honestly, is the epitome of simplicity. Going beyond standard backup and recovery operations, Time Machine is also an excellent disaster recovery tool – if you have serious enough issues that you need to rebuild your machine, the Mac OS X installer actually has the option of doing a rebuild and recovery from Time Machine backups.
To be blunt – as a backup utility for end users, Time Machine is an ace in the hole, and one of the most underrated features of Mac OS X.
Sure, Time Machine doesn’t do everything that every user wants it to do – but then again, no product ever will. Yet I’ve backed up a significant number of TB (as far as desktops go) using Time Machine, and recently I was highly pleased to be able to recover 18 months of my fathers’ hard work with no effort at all. This was from a machine where I’d setup Time Machine and had not had a chance to visit since – nor check remotely, since my parents don’t use the internet.
So frankly, on behalf of Windows users, I’m somewhat horrified at the experiences being felt with Microsoft’s Windows 7 backup utility – and their use case scenarios!
As documented over at The Register, “Windows 7 Backup Gets Users’ Backs Up”, there’s a litany of issues being reported:
Jon Hell posted on April 23 that he is backing up 900GB of data on a quad core PC with 7GB of RAM; “After twenty four hours Windows Backup had managed to complete 18 per cent of the backup, but after forty eight hours, it had got even slower, and had only reached 23 per cent of the full backup.”
And:
John Dougrez-Lewis was the first poster, and wrote that he could use file copy to move 250GB of file data to an external eSATA drive in an hour at a speed of 72MB/sec. When he did the same job using Windows 7 RTM Backup it took 14 hours, roughly 5MB/sec – more than 14 times slower.
If these were isolated experiences it could be understood – after all, no product will work perfectly for every single person.
The actual Microsoft forum regarding the issues is directly available via this link. We also see an article from Microsoft, Backing up large data set on Windows 7:
Windows Backup is optimized to help home users protect their important data on their PCs and this is typically expected to be 200GB of data on average. On a PC that contains significantly larger data size, Windows Backup’s performance may degrade. If you need to back up more than 400GB of data, we recommend that you backup your PC using a system image.
Sorry to say, but this “meh” attitude towards backup turns my stomach. If this were an article published a decade ago about an OS-included backup utility it might be understandable – after all, a decade ago, 400GB of data was a big amount!
The article goes on to provide instructions for setting up a scheduled system image. Sure, the average techo will look at the instructions provided and punch through them in a couple of minutes at most, but with instructions like the following, you’re guaranteed to (a) turn most average users off and (b) definitely provide a terrible user experience:
If you have a separate data drive, you will need to create a task in Task Scheduler to create the system image:
a. Open an elevated command prompt
b. Type the following command:
SCHTASKS /Create /SC <Frequency> /TN <TaskName> /RL HIGHEST /ST <StartTime> /TR “WBADMIN START Backup –backupTarget:<target> -include:<source> -quiet”
This goes to the heart of why Time Machine is so successful – Apple recognised that the only way to get users to backup is to make it painless and easy. Microsoft’s approach to end-user backup seems to be diametrically opposed to that of Apple – and as a result of it, I know which backup mechanism will save more consumer data, even given the hugely different market shares of the platforms.
When it comes to backup, Microsoft would do well to “start their photocopiers”.
(Image copyright the LTO Consortium.)
