Microsoft, start your copiers

 Aside, Backup theory, Tidbit  1 Response »
Jun 232010
 

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”.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 20:44  Tagged with: , , , ,

The fall and decline of Microsoft

 Aside  No Responses »
Nov 012009
 

Great article over at Newsweek about the Lost Decade of Microsoft. I’m fully aware that Dan Lyons is Fake Steve, but that doesn’t change that fact that his insights are often right on the ball. I’ll also fully admit that I have no love for Microsoft – I appreciate that they bring competition to the industry, but honestly, over the last 5 years at least, if not longer, that competition has been limited and mouldy. This is a company that has been lacking direction, focus and ability to “wow” for far too long, riding on its coat-tails and existing product marketshare without innovating. To quote Dan Lyons:

Now, instead of being scary, Microsoft has become a bit of a joke. Yes, its Windows operating system still runs on more than 90 percent of PCs, and the Office application suite rules the desktop. But those are old markets. In new areas, Microsoft has stumbled.

The best thing that could happen to Microsoft at this point would be to replace Steve Ballmer with someone who actually understands the technology they’re trying to sell.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 20:27  Tagged with:

Sidekick is dead – lessons in data loss

 Data loss  2 Responses »
Oct 122009
 

The net has been rife with reports of an extreme data loss event occurring at Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile for the Sidekick service over the weekend.

As a backup professional, this doesn’t disappoint me, it doesn’t gall me – it makes me furious on behalf of the affected users that companies would continue to take such a cavalier attitude towards enterprise data protection.

This doesn’t represent just a failure to have a backup in place (which in and of itself is more than sufficient for significant condemnation), but a lack of professionalism in the processes. I.e., there should be some serious head kicking going on regarding this, most notably regarding the following sorts of questions:

  • Why wasn’t there a backup?
  • Where was their change control that prevented the work being done due to the backup not being available?
  • Why wasn’t the system able to handle the failure of a single array?
  • When will the class action law suits start to roll in?

I don’t buy into any nonsense that maybe the backup couldn’t be done because of the amount of data and the time required to do it. That’s just a fanciful workgroup take on what should be a straight forward enterprise level of data backup. Not only that, the system was obviously not designed for redundancy at all … I’ve got (relatively, compared to MS, T-Mobile, etc) small customers using array replication so that if a SAN fails they can at least fall back to a broken off replica. Furthermore, this begs the question: For such a service, why aren’t they running a properly isolated DR site? Restoring access to data should have been as simple as altering the paths to a snapped off replica on an alternate, non-upgraded array.

This points to an utterly untrustworthy system – at the absolute best it smacks of a system where bean counters have prohibited the use of appropriate data protection and redundancy technologies for the scope of the services being provided. At worst, it smacks of an ineptly designed system, an ineptly designed set of maintenance procedures, an inept appreciation of enterprise data protection strategies, and a perhaps even level of contempt for the data of users.

(For any vendor that would wish to crow, based on the reports, that it was a Hitachi SAN that was being upgraded by Hitachi staff and therefore it’s a Hitachi problem: pull your heads in – SANs can fail, particularly during upgrade processes where human errors can creep in, and since every vendor continues to employee humans, they’re all susceptible to such catastrophic failures.)

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 06:56  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Aside – The decline of Microsoft

 Aside  No Responses »
Jul 312009
 

Being a Mac user, a lot of people expect me to loathe everything Microsoft. Also, having come from a Unix background, equally as many people expect me to loathe everything Microsoft. I’ll be honest – I have no great fondness for them, but I’m also practical enough to recognise that the chances of them falling over in a heap at any point are microscopically small. I also wouldn’t wish it on them. Instead, what I hope is that they eventually learn cooperative engagement in the marketplace.

To me, Microsoft has been over the last few years suffering the sort of decline that comes not from a larger competitor taking it on, but what I describe as “death by a thousand mosquito bites”. No one single failing of theirs, and no one single competitor of theirs, is causing them catastrophic harm; however, the combination of their failings, and their competitors, is actually starting to dig in.

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has one of his typically insightful commentaries on Microsoft’s decline. Yes, it’s told from an Apple perspective, but Gruber is one of the leading Apple bloggers these days, so that’s to be expected. If you’re at all interested in a “non-Microsoft” perspective, Gruber’s commentary is worth spending 10 minutes to read.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 12:13  Tagged with:
© 2012 The NetWorker Blog Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha