I ran 8 for a year and put up with all of the usability crap, but they lost me when my hard drive died and I found out how crappy the built-in backup software is. The damn thing doesn't save a disk image, nor have a similar way to recover from a completely dead disk. If I have to reinstall from scratch, it sure as hell wasn't going to be 8 again. So now I'm back to 7 and its sane backup program.

It's not like the early version of Vista, though. It's more like a late Vista service release.

I think this probably indicates that they bite off too much in each release. It's actually a common problem when companies try to abandon an incremental development cycle and get a little ambitious.

NTFS supports arbitrary metadata "streams", analogous to xattrs on unix. Windows and applications simply don't make use of them very much.

Also, Microsoft did introduce a new filesystem: ReFS. It is sort-of analogous to zfs or btrfs, but not very well supported in Windows 8 at the moment and not as feature-complete. Still, they seem to be ahead of Apple which is still using HFS.

It is legal paranoia. Just like how IT-types have network security paranoia and ban a bunch of software/tools that *could* *potentially* introduce security issues to the company network...

I mean, sure, if you spend time looking at an individual license it could be OK. But why spend the time to investigate? Just blanket deny, and if somebody thinks it's worth fighting the bureaucracy to use a damn piece of software, *then* it might be worth looking into making an exception...

That's another good idea, though you wouldn't be able to take advantage of clones and such so that the backup's data would be invalid once the resilver started until it was finished... If I went that route, I'd make sure I had completed a scrub before connecting the backup drives.

Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)

Remind me to put a copy of <insert horrible title> on your book shelves next time you leave the door open. It's not a crime, but it is annoying.

I expect a bit better from Apple. After all, you pay a ton of cash for their hardware. It just shows that the corporate culture at Apple is moving further and further away from computing and more towards low cost media sales and commission on payments. Too bad, cause I really like OSX.

I agree. However, the nice thing about keeping the data live is that it will benefit from any upgrades you do over the years... what seems like a lot of storage today will be trivial in the future. And you can piggyback on your video storage backup for all of your backup needs. But yeah, the simplest thing to do is copy to a pair of drives and put them in a safe deposit box. From past experience, I would probably add a drive full of parity data as well :)

I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.