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Ridiculous, certainly! But let's remember that all this nonsense has come about from pressure on companies like Google and Facebook from paranoid users (and scaremongering 'security' professionals more than willing to make a fast buck). I'm disinclined to blame Google for the bunker mentality of its 'customers'.
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That's an extremely old picture. The first time I saw it, it was on a computer made of bamboo and stone, and pterodactyls were circling a nearby active volcano.
Cornelius Henning wrote: Never complain when you cannot get a seat on the train!
Just because someone somewhere at some time was on an even fuller train does not make my situation any better.
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That is what Pakistan is all about. Real-time stunts are performed without using any Maya-like animators. 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Hover your cursor over the image.
You will discover that "Frando Calamba" is either...
- An extremely common name there, or
- An example of severe multiple personality disorder, or
- One User ID being shared by too many real humans
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How's that even possible? 
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As some of you know, I am preparing for Win10 by making sure I have a good, solid Win7 image I can "fall back" to in the event that Win10 is more Win8.2 than actually useful as an operating system.
So I thought I'd try a couple of free system imagers: "AOMEI Backupper" and Windows "Backup and Restore", both of which have a system imager.
Initially, AOMEI had it hands down: nice looking app, easy to navigate, easy to use, compressed images. Windows...well, least said about that lot, the better. It's not pretty.
The way AOMEI stores images is nicer IMO as well: it's just a file so you can move it, rename it, copy it...The Windows one is a lot larger, and stored as an Admin-only folder so it's a lot more PITA than it needs to be.
So last night was the important test: restore the image.
Obviously, I wasn't going to restore this onto my "live" machine! But, I have a surplus-to-requirements NAS with 4 1TB drives in that I need to clear before it goes up for sale.
So I pull one at random from the NAS, open up the pc, disconnect the HDD, and hook up the "new" one.
Boot from the appropriate recovery disk (each app makes it's own) and off we go.
Initially, the AOMEI looked good - but then I started to worry, when about one minute after booting the PC it's at 49% complete...
After half an hour or so, it's dead - no video, no HDD activity, no nothing except the caps light toggling. After two hours and absolutely nothing happening I killed it.
Tried the Windows one: worked fine, if rather slowly, and rebooted itself unattended so it was ready in the morning. All apps working fine, no noticeable difference from when I made the image.
I suspect that the AOMEI problem was that the disk was already partitioned - it asked which partition I wanted to restore into - Windows just said "I'm going to kill everything on this disk, ok?" and got on with it. Which for an image restore is probably a lot more appropriate.
If that's the case, then I'll try again tonight after deleting the disk partitions first and see if it works - because it was a lot nicer to use - but that's a big limitation if true: you need a "working PC" in order to recover the working PC...
Anyone got any other free imagers that they like / suggest I should test? I'm willing to give most of 'em a go and it could give us all some interesting comparative info.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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You may find this thread useful:
http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?fid=1159&select=5033410&fr=12551#xx0xx[^]
Western Digital offer a WD version of Acronis for free on their website, but this version only works if it sees a WD drive attached to the machine. I have using a WD Acronis for many years, and this old version works great, but last year I tried the 2014 full Acronis with bad results. I quickly dumped it. Their customer service sucks! I have no idea how good the 2015 version is.
One final thought: Acronis can verify the image file, once it's made. I think being able to verify an image is crucial. I have had images that failed verification, rendering them useless. These are very large files and if a single bit gets flipped by a gremlin: That's it - the image is useless.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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That's the link I had already found with google and used to create the image!
(It's a good description of how to do it, that - well written and accurate)
Acronis, acronis...I'm trying to remember why I stopped using them...they had a couple of bad versions if I recall and I gave up with them, I think.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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The past 2 versions of Acronis have gotten progressively worse where the new one is a heaping pile of dung. I've had to go back 2 versions to get one that works like it should. A lot of people are upset because Acronis not only put out a piece of crap but customer service is none existent unless you pay them there $20/hr tech. fee.
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.1 new web site.
I know the voices in my head are not real but damn they come up with some good ideas!
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You can try the free version of EaseUS Todo Backup[^] I've used it with success in the past, but the restore did take very long, which might have been a bug in the version I used.
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I'm using Macrium Reflect and I'm quite happy with it. Backups are files and can be verified, can be browsed or converted to a VHD, it can create a rescue CD. So far restores have always worked.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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I have always used Acronis true image but to each his own disaster recovery.
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Thanks for the very informative report !
I used to use "Drive Snapshot" (commercial, 30-trial available) [^], from Denmark, but with Win 7, for whatever reasons I forget, I went over to using the Windows built-in back-up tool. While Drive Snapshot is now listed as supporting 8/8.1, it appears not to have been updated since February, 2014: no idea about how it would play with Win X.
When I did use Drive Snapshot, it was blazing-fast, and the you could open the drive back-ups it created without mounting, or installing, to access files/folders, which was quite useful.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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I use CloneZilla. The UI is not brilliant, but it works well and creates a single file.
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In case you came across news articles about "The Batteriser", a new product to "extend disposable battery life by 800%" and didn't know if it's trustworthy: Dave Jones, Aussie Electrical Engineer, debunks it in a video on his EEVblog Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk[^]
tl;dw: it's not 800% more battery life but 800% more marketing
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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There's no way it's going to be trustworthy: I mean, look at the name! I assume it wraps your devices in brown envelopes and lets them hold World Cup competitions?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Quote: it's not 800% more battery life but 800% more marketing
Snake oil salesmen! 
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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In a VBS file:
Dim username : username =
(It was after a fair bit of SQL work, so I reckon I can be excused this once)
cheers
Chris Maunder
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You're using VBS. There is no excuse.
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:cough: dim programmer :cough:
![Jig | [Dance]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/jig.gif)
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Very good, but can you spot the bug?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I am going to have a guess that because you used 'myusername' and not "myusername", the actual value applied to username was 'myusername' (or possibly 0) instead of myusername.
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Almost there.
The error was correct: it needs ", not '. However, it just throws a syntax error.
So staring at var='value' and being told it's a syntax error was doing my head in. Did I forget a semi colon? Did I not declare the variable? Are my quotes not balanced? Did I use a backtick instead of a quote (I'd been doing Markdown, too, so my head was getting seriously fuzzy).
And then the penny dropped.
Interesting how you see what you expect to see.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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