Why you MUST make recovery discs

[MJSWARLORD]

A lot of users never bother to make recovery discs just because they have a recovery program on their pc. BUT you need to read this , i have 3 pc's , 2 packard bell and a custom built games rig made by pc specialists. One of my packard bell pc's locked up and i had no choice but to turn off the power , i had done this many times in the past and got away with it. The last time i did it windows would not go to the desktop and it reported 3 corrupted registry entries that stopped it booting to desktop. The recovery partition would not fix this so the only way i could get to the desktop was to boot from a recovery disc i had made. I was then able to get to desktop to use the factory reset program. Had i been lazy and not made the disc the pc would have ended up in the dustbin as there was no way i could do anything with it.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I've never used a recovery disc. All my data is cloud based, all my apps install from the cloud, all my game saves are in the cloud. If anything goes wrong, I just reinstall.

Btw, no computer is ever dead due to a software failure (except in very rare circumstances), you can always reinstall unless there's a hardware issue.

 

[ubuysa]

Recovery disks and the recovery partition are, in my personal opinion of course, more benefit to the computer vendor than the user. Almost every commercial computer comes loaded with bloatware, for which the vendor is presumably paid by the software vendors. IMO the main purpose of a recovery partition, or recovery disk made from it, is to reload all that bloatware when you do a factory reset!

All you really need is that which PCS provide; a genuine Windows installation media and media containing all the drivers (even if these are older drivers). You can reinstall Windows and get a perfectly stable running system from those almost as fast as you can by running the recovery partition or the boot disks you make from them.

Again IMO, the best way to protect yourself against software failures of the type you mention is to take regular images of your system drive or partition. I use Macrium Reflect to do that and I cut a new system disk image every night, keeping only the most recent 30. Whenever I suspect a software problem or even the sniff of a malware infection I simply restore last night's disk image. On my i7 powered PC with an M.2 SSD it takes about 8 minutes to restore the system partition.

 

[Wozza63]

Yeah I have sufficient backups and use secondary drives for anything that isn't programs as well as cloud. That way if Windows goes wrong, just reinstall, no harm done. And most of the big data on the other drives that isn't backed up in the cloud is mostly games or DVD rips, which would be annoying if I lost, but not the end of the world.

 

[MJSWARLORD]

Hi guys just a quick recap, i deliberatly put this posting up as a bit of a frightener to what could happen if you dont have a recovery program of some sort on disc. None pcs customers read our forums and not all shop bought pc's come with windows on disc in case something goes wrong . I guess thats a browny point to pcs. Whilst i agree with all the comments made you all missed one point i was emphasising. In my particular case "the cloud" or any other software was of no use to me as i was unable to get to the desktop without my own recovery disc. I dont know if programs such as macrium refect can get you to the desktop if something is stopping it doing it naturally as i have never used it.

Thanks for the feedback and even if only a few people read this posting and act on it then the 4 of us might just have saved somebody a lot of heart ache and fustration

 

[Wozza63]

Well Windows has recovery tools built right into the system that can almost always be booted into even if you can't get to the OS. Gives you access to the console to potentially copy files over or fix the OS manually, or it can be used to do a full reset by itself, which can you can choose to either do a complete reinstall, or just a reinstall of the core windows files which will just mean your programs and settings are lost. Failing that, Windows also has a Media creation tool, which means you can just pop a memory stick into another PC and it will give you a bootable installer ready to go in usually a few minutes. Stuff like that isn't much of an issue these days since most households (at least in the UK) have access to more than one PC.

 

[ubuysa]

Hi guys just a quick recap, i deliberatly put this posting up as a bit of a frightener to what could happen if you dont have a recovery program of some sort on disc. None pcs customers read our forums and not all shop bought pc's come with windows on disc in case something goes wrong . I guess thats a browny point to pcs. Whilst i agree with all the comments made you all missed one point i was emphasising. In my particular case "the cloud" or any other software was of no use to me as i was unable to get to the desktop without my own recovery disc. I dont know if programs such as macrium refect can get you to the desktop if something is stopping it doing it naturally as i have never used it.

Thanks for the feedback and even if only a few people read this posting and act on it then the 4 of us might just have saved somebody a lot of heart ache and fustratio4

You made a very good point and it's excellent advice to ensure you have some way of recovering your system should the worst happen. Good advice.