Tablet PC support - impossible?

[MrPete]

We recently went through a harrowing backup recovery experience on a Tablet PC running XP SP2.

 

First thing to recognize: Microsoft has not released installation CD's for Windows Tablet PC Edition. Thus, there appears to be no normal way to create the necessary CD for disaster recovery.

 

We worked around that, very painfully, by building our own "from scratch" using a set of XP volume license CD's to which we have access. That's not something any normal user can do: it is technically difficult, and the necessary CD's are not available to most users.

 

More (?) important, we found that it is a mistake to leave "Backup File Security Information from Workstations" turned off. Various applications depend on correct file ownership data for correct operation. We ended up reinstalling all Adobe and Microsoft Office applications, plus several others... and now have enabled File Security Info backup across the board.

 

Suggestion: create a Retrospect option to store a complete copy of the boot partition as a disaster recovery baseline. That's what we did before purchasing Retrospect... and it was a reliable godsend when hard drives failed.

 

BTW, today's hard drives now fail at a rate of approximately 1 percent per year, independent of mfg or type. That's in the specs, and was confirmed to me by an industry executive. It's not a big deal to enterprises, but is important to small businesses... and why good backup like Retrospect is so important! (Our laptops seem to get more than their share of dead drives )

 

Edited August 6, 2008 by Guest