Rapid Desktop Replacement
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@BRRABill said:
I am just thinking of it as a convenience. I'm working at 12. I got lunch, and my laptop gets stolen. I pick up a new laptop on the way back from Best Buy and I am back up and running as I was at 12 pretty quickly.
But ... I store all my personal stuff on this laptop too, which makes me think me reticence here is machines only on a personal level. I guess I am really thinking of a personal level. Like your elderly uncle who has all their pictures and music on their machines, but aren't backing up.
Is it really just a matter of ... hey if it is important to them they should know better? Or ... hey if it is really that important, it's more than just a personal machine and should be considered as such?
This only sounds reasonable because you are both ignoring certain aspects and have a cascade of problems leading to it:
- The use case where the laptop gets stolen highlights the importance of not going down this road. You are looking at a use case where having the data on the device exposed you and ignoring that you need to protect that data and only thinking about recovery.
- In no case where you protect that data does imaging do anything useful. So you have to expose one risk to justify this weird use case.
- You are using a ridiculously unlikely scenario (laptop theft) to attempt to justify bizarre processes. You are not looking at overall risk factors but cherry picking one in an attempt to justify a bad practice.
- No one should store all of their data on their laptop. Doesn't matter who they are. Fix the bad practices and your use case vanishes completely.
- Even in cases where you do store your data, exposed on your laptop, you are still not protecting the data well and making a lot of work where none should exist.
- Your use case requires you to replace the device with one that is very similar unnecessarily.
You are layering on assumptions and bad decisions in an attempt to find a special scenario where this makes sense. And even with all of that, I can't agree that it makes sense even in a contrived scenario. Imaging an end user device simply doesn't make sense. Given any specific example, no matter how contrived, I'm pretty confident that we can show a better process to follow.
There is a reason why Linux desktops and Mac desktops are never imaged even though you are free to do so, unlike with Windows. Not because of licensing, but because imaging end user physical devices isn't useful.
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@BRRABill said:
Is it really just a matter of ... hey if it is important to them they should know better?
Pretty much
.
.Or ... hey if it is really that important, it's more than just a personal machine and should be considered as such?
If it's a business machine, then the owner should care about these things. Needless to say, many don't think about it. They are spending most if not all of their time worrying about their core business, but they are failing their businesses because they are not also worrying about how their business will survive if that one machine that holds everything that matters to them suddenly dies.
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
You are allowed to create images of each machine to be restored on the same hardware that the image came from.
If it works, which the home user cannot legally check.
How would a home user check anyway? The only use case for this is where data is all resident on a single device and never shared and no other devices exist. So in any case where we struggle to justify the process, the user could not check anyway. In any use case where they could check, the idea of imaging as a backup is demonstrably quite bad.
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@coliver said:
Recommend something like Crashplan... not instantaneous like you are expecting but the easiest way to do it.
That's actually what I use all the time. $5. Awesome.
But I've also had to restore the large amounts of data. Not awesome.
Especially with apps and settings involved. -
@Dashrender said:
You can legally image your own machine for restoring to your own (same) computer with an OEM license.
Yes but you can't legally spin it up to test that it's actually working. I mean, you can access files, but not the image itself.
All you can do is pray, and drink beer, and be happy.
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@BRRABill said:
What about bookmarks, things like that?
Again, I've taken this down to just the most basic of users. Your grandmother. The crazy guy who lives in the next apartments who knows you work with computers.
The more you take it to basic home users, the farther you get from imaging as a process. Imaging requires technical know how, always on connections, target devices on the network, etc.
Bookmarks are handled by any normal backup tool AND by all major browsers. No need for any special process there.
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@coliver said:
Recommend something like Crashplan... not instantaneous like you are expecting but the easiest way to do it.
Crashplan, Backblaze... lots of good options. Very cheap. Good for those low end cases where users do not own a full infrastructure.
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@BRRABill said:
@coliver said:
Recommend something like Crashplan... not instantaneous like you are expecting but the easiest way to do it.
That's actually what I use all the time. $5. Awesome.
But I've also had to restore the large amounts of data. Not awesome.
Especially with apps and settings involved.How much does the average user have though? We are talking home users who place stuff on their drive and hope for the best. Something is better then nothing in this case.
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
You can legally image your own machine for restoring to your own (same) computer with an OEM license.
Yes but you can't legally spin it up to test that it's actually working. I mean, you can access files, but not the image itself.
All you can do is pray, and drink beer, and be happy.
Although accessing the files is all that you would need or generally want.
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@BRRABill said:
@coliver said:
Recommend something like Crashplan... not instantaneous like you are expecting but the easiest way to do it.
That's actually what I use all the time. $5. Awesome.
But I've also had to restore the large amounts of data. Not awesome.
Especially with apps and settings involved.If you have a large amount of data, how long will it take to get an image to restore?
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@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
Is it really just a matter of ... hey if it is important to them they should know better?
Pretty much
.
.Or ... hey if it is really that important, it's more than just a personal machine and should be considered as such?
If it's a business machine, then the owner should care about these things. Needless to say, many don't think about it. They are spending most if not all of their time worrying about their core business, but they are failing their businesses because they are not also worrying about how their business will survive if that one machine that holds everything that matters to them suddenly dies.
One could argue that backups are about as core as business can get.
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
You can legally image your own machine for restoring to your own (same) computer with an OEM license.
Yes but you can't legally spin it up to test that it's actually working. I mean, you can access files, but not the image itself.
All you can do is pray, and drink beer, and be happy.
Is that a real concern? Not one that I share. Though I'll disagree with you.. sure you can test it.
But a second drive for your computer. Then restore the image to that drive and run it in your computer for a while.. There you go, confirmed the image is good.. and you're always legal.
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@Dashrender said:
But a second drive for your computer. Then restore the image to that drive and run it in your computer for a while.. There you go, confirmed the image is good.. and you're always legal.
But that is hard. (LOL. Kidding.)
That's another lesson I have learned from this. A lot of this stuff works, and is for the convenience of IT. At a cost of licensing, of course.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
Is it really just a matter of ... hey if it is important to them they should know better?
Pretty much
.
.Or ... hey if it is really that important, it's more than just a personal machine and should be considered as such?
If it's a business machine, then the owner should care about these things. Needless to say, many don't think about it. They are spending most if not all of their time worrying about their core business, but they are failing their businesses because they are not also worrying about how their business will survive if that one machine that holds everything that matters to them suddenly dies.
One could argue that backups are about as core as business can get.
While I tend to agree with you, the countless thread at SW and in numerous other sites around the web show that business owners often overlook this.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You don't do imaging for restores, or you don't have a standard deployment image?
I don't have a standard deployment image. And I don't do fresh installs, I'm happy with the HP image and uninstalling any bloatware (which isn't much, just a few HP utilities, there isn't generally any 3rd party crap anymore)
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
But a second drive for your computer. Then restore the image to that drive and run it in your computer for a while.. There you go, confirmed the image is good.. and you're always legal.
But that is hard. (LOL. Kidding.)
That's another lesson I have learned from this. A lot of this stuff works, and is for the convenience of IT. At a cost of licensing, of course.
While that is totally true (in some cases like MS Windows) I'm not seeing this as a convenience. I think that MS has licensing restrictions around this because this is not a good use case and they are licensing for other reasons.
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
But a second drive for your computer. Then restore the image to that drive and run it in your computer for a while.. There you go, confirmed the image is good.. and you're always legal.
But that is hard. (LOL. Kidding.)
That's another lesson I have learned from this. A lot of this stuff works, and is for the convenience of IT. At a cost of licensing, of course.
You had a problem, and I provided a simple solution. one that's pretty cheap to. Heck, using something like Clonezilla (which is 100% free) you could the drive into the computer, boot from the Clonezilla media, image from one drive to the other, then disconnect the first drive and boot.. test it, shut it down, disconnect the second drive, connect the first drive and go to work... every time you want to take an image.. just connect the second drive and do the above process again.
Is this for the normal home user - of course not!
The normal home user should be shoved into a Chromebook. Then 100% of their stuff is in the cloud and they just buy a new device and keep working.. problem solved.
But if you have special applications, settings, etc as you've mentioned - then you are no longer normal, and you need to act as such.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't do imaging for restores, or you don't have a standard deployment image?
I don't have a standard deployment image. And I don't do fresh installs, I'm happy with the HP image and uninstalling any bloatware (which isn't much, just a few HP utilities, there isn't generally any 3rd party crap anymore)
Even at five minutes, seems like at that size it would justify a standard image. We use HP and to avoid the bloatware on ten machines we found the VL to be well worth it. Makes for a more stable system too, slightly.
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@Dashrender is correct. Typical home users need Chromebooks.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't do imaging for restores, or you don't have a standard deployment image?
I don't have a standard deployment image. And I don't do fresh installs, I'm happy with the HP image and uninstalling any bloatware (which isn't much, just a few HP utilities, there isn't generally any 3rd party crap anymore)
You never know for sure what could be hidden in a factory install.
