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Disaster recovery from an external bootable device, prepared by the backup application.
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OK, I'm not worried about that, I am only interested in saving the data, reinstalling everything in that computer would be super easy, but the data itself would be a disaster if would be lost.
Thanks for the explanation.
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There is this old saying: Backups always work for 50%. That means the backup.
It helps to test the restore functionality for whatever is needed, files, folders or entire disks.
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Joan, sorry busy week. Let me explain.
UEFI came along because BIOS was not able to prevent root kit injections of malware. Anyone here can correct me, but after researching it a bit (2 weeks of late nights) this is my conclusion. Insert Microsoft to make it even worse. Then add in the TPM hardware... to make a long story short, you cannot easily clone a drive that boots in a UEFI enabled system. What I experienced was that *none* of the backup s/w companies understood it. It was completely hopeless.
You can't even image the damn things - the new drive won't boot. I was trying to move my wife's laptop from a spinner to an SSD - UEFI made it impossible. My new laptop (4 yo now) came with UEFI disabled. I called them up and asked - hey why is this off? "It's not worth the trouble."
I'm an independent consultant. For my to lose a primary boot drive is a catastrophe. This happened to me in 2004. This is long before UEFI or TPM. I have no time to spend long times of recovering backup files at the whim of the backup s/w. I sure as hell can't spend a week reinstalling s/w. For me a backup not only includes data but the complete OS. So I bought a SATA disk imaging device, an extra SATA drive or two. I would pull the active HD from the laptop, pop it into the image device and push copy. Perfect image. Booted every time. Simple.
Technology moves on. I bought my wife what I thought was a nice ASUS laptop. It was so loaded with bloatware, and the spinner was so slow, the laptop was useless (and it's a core i5 with 16GB of ram). I thought I would just image the spinner to an SSD. Won't boot. Welcome to UEFI hell. ASUS had no idea, Microsoft was being Microsoft, I ended up re-installing Win10 fresh on the SSD.
So, nightly data backups of non OS stuff, these s/w programs might be good enough. Image an OS? Be prepared for pain. It took me a week of work to image my NVMe drive, but it did not have UEFI.
Test your backups
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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WOW!
Had no idea... anyway, in this case the computer is not a critical system, only my mother's PC. Files there are important though, therefore, I need only data backup, she has only Windows and Office installed, a virtual machine which attacks the relevant data in the SSD.
Therefore I can recover it all by reinstalling windows (during boot I should do it easily given it is a Lenovo with the recovery image preloaded) and reinstalling Office.
Anyway, now I understand what you said, and wow... It is amazing to see how things get worse over time.
Thanks for the explanation!
 ![Beer | [beer]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/beer.gif)
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Yep, I have Acronis from many years, and they go worst every year more... I think the better version was around 2003. Up to the last year I did a disk clone every month, and when I needed it I found it was not working because was missing the partition table... I was very disappointed... Many years ago it just worked with one click.
Now they have a ton of features, and are very pricey, but they cannot be compared to other free-version, the free version are much better and reliable, but the UI is worst. Bad decision when you focus on the UI instead of the functionality...
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Yay! I saw this yesterday. It's definitely on my watch list.
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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Take in ? (4,4)
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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HOOD WINK?
I dunno ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Nice try but nope
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I was thinking of that too, but as with OG's guess, it's spelled as a single word.
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I'm rolling my own everything, as is often the case when targeting a new platform with new things. It's fun. There's a whole lot of challenge. First was a graphics engine and several drivers, then a true type engine for constrained memory environments, now an unzipping engine for constrained environments.
If you code in C or C++, take a look at this cool stuff:
GitHub - nothings/stb: stb single-file public domain libraries for C/C++[^]
There are gobs of useful public domain code that can teach you how to do all manner of things. They are dependency free single header file implementations to do various very cool things. I'm using the modified guts of one of them in my truetype engine, and the guts of another for my unzipping engine, and probably more of that (stb_image) to revamp my image loading to support more formats.
They're a bit messy, but still cool and the (lack of) license is awesome.
Anyway, I've had to modify all of the code that I've found here because it's geared for desktops and so it happily allocates RAM like you have infinite of it, but that's part of the fun.
I strongly encourage folks to code IoT stuff. It forces you to understand the inner workings of all the nonsense you take for granted with coding today.
Cheers. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Luckily (unfortunately) I am old enough that I already know most of this stuff, but I still enjoy IoT programming in the very limited time I have for it. It takes me back to the time where we wrote code, unlike now where 90% of the time is spend fighting 3rd party libraries and trying to get our code deployed somewhere it will run.
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Coding IoT reminds me of when I began coding on little 8 bit and 16 bit monsters back in the mid 1980s.
I know, an Apple ][e is not a PDP-11 and I am a whippersnapper. I'll get off your lawn. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Awesome! I started programming on a Radio Shack Micro computer 10 with the 16k expansion model back in 83. My first program was slots (slot machine). I then started my big program, a text based Star Trek game. Later, I added graphics, all done in BasicA.
[Edit] Sorry about that. My original response came across as a little rude. [/Edit]
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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I didn't think you were being rude. I was just being silly. I learned to code in 1986 on the hateful/ill fated Apple ][gs.
John Scully will forever have my ire.
I started in Applesoft, then learned 6502 bytecode (call -151) before realizing there was a built in mini assembler (!), so I learned that
I learned the 65c816 specific stuff far later, so I was basically coding 8 bit on a 16 bit machine.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Nah. Take a good old 8 bit processor and build your own little computer. And then you fire up the assembler and start at memory address 0000 with something like this:
LDI HI(StackTop)
PHI R2
LDI LO(StackTop)
PLO R2
LDI HI(Main)
PHI R3
LDI LO(Main)
PLO R3
LDI HI(StdCallProcedure)
PHI R4
LDI LO(StdCallProcedure)
PLO R4
LDI HI(StdReturnProcedure)
PHI R5
LDI LO(StdReturnProcedure)
PLO R5
SEX R2
SEP R3
Main: ...
And it must be a good old 8 bit or early 16 bit processor because you don't want to buy equipment at the price of real estate or study quantum mechanics to explain why your design does not work.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I used to do that kind of thing back in the 80s on 6502s. Now I prefer the challenge of crafting C++ code that generates the precise assembly code I want (or better than what I would have written)
Real programmers use butterflies
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I remember doing stuff in 6502 assembler on my Commodore PET and BBC computers - yay, nostalgia!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Rollin' rollin' rollin'[^]
 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Awesome! Thanks for the link and congrats on your progress. Sounds amazing.
I'm currently working on a tracker system that uses a custom PCB with the latest chipsets, so everything has to be written from scratch. Me and two friends have two patents on the system and hopefully, we will be going to manufacturing early next year.
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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Cool. I've got a custom hardware project that is currently being prototyped right now. It's a smart version of an earlier device and I have to develop everything from scratch but also to an existing specification, which is both great that they have one, and challenging that I can't dictate my own requirements (you know how it is I'm sure)
Even then, I do have a lot of creative freedom on the project, and I've de facto taken over the hardware development of it too, even though my direct contact for the project is the electrical engineer. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: I strongly encourage folks to code IoT stuff. It forces you to understand the inner workings of all the nonsense you take for granted with coding today.
That's why I did recommend (time ago) to start with automation in PLC or robotics, back then they had way smaller resources and you had to think a bit sometimes to make it faster or even possible.
Current PLCs are not comparable anymore. They can handle very big things and you really have to do things really bad to reach the limits.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
modified 15-Jul-21 10:34am.
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