Second-cup-of-coffee

Windows 7 woes

I have been, more or less, happily running Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now. I wound up formatting the drive during the Mac OS X install and then installing only Windows 7 on the drive and using the OS X disc to install the Windows driver. I went a while with no crashes and digging the interface improvements. However, lately I experienced two crashes. A bummer, to be sure, but even more disconcerting was that all my open files seemed to be corrupted after reboot. Dreamweaver couldn’t start up because of a corrupted preference file and all of the files I had been editing were corrupt. The file size seemed fine but the files were blank in any text editor. Grrrrr…

One other thing this file loss caused me to realize is that Restore Previous Versions on Windows 7 is no substitute for Time Machine. I had thought that Windows 7 would save versions of changed files in between the daily incremental backups that were running. Apparently, though, previous versions are saved during the incremental backup and during System Restore points which can be triggered by software installs, for example.

Time Machine, in comparison, backs up changed files every hour. And it can be used to easily do a software restore or migrate information to another machine. I have been looking for a substitute for Windows 7 but, so far, cannot find anything close to being as smooth, seamless and as slick as Time Machine.