subject: No More Recovery Discs [print this page] No More Recovery Discs No More Recovery Discs
The days of finding Windows discs nestling at the bottom old PC box are fast coming to an end. Current practice does away with backup discs, with vendors instead taking the cheaper option of installing recovery software on a hard disk partition, leaving the buyer with no physical copy of the operating system they paid for.
System backups on a hard disk partition have one obvious and significant drawback - if the hard disk fails, so does the partition, and along with it goes the backup software supplied by the manufacturer. The PC firms rely on end users to bum a copy of the recovery partition on good quality media, and store it somewhere safe for the day that disaster strikes.
In many cases, you can't even pay extra to get physical recovery media when purchasing a new machine. The manufacturers' line that partitions are adequate for consumers rather flies in the face of the alarmist advice. Beneath an offer to buy backup media a recovery disc is the single most important accessory to have with your new laptop or PC.
If worst comes to worst, most manufacturers will supply a recovery disc after the event of a hard drive failure. There is usually a 'grace' period on purchase of a new laptop or PC. Beyond that grace period, the attitude is very much that if you haven't burned a recovery disc and then suffer a hard drive failure, there's an opportunity (for the company) to profit.
Even getting hold of a recovery disc can be a pain. Acquiring a recovery disc, for example, involves a significant amount of hoop jumping that could leave you without a computer for three weeks.
The danger of data loss aside, frontline computer maintenance experts have also criticised the way many manufacturers set up the recovery partitions, because it's common practice to split the hard drive in two, rather than simply allocate a partition big enough to accommodate the 5GB to 10GB of recovery files.
It's currently a tricky situation. The only thing you can do right now is to make sure you have backed-up your data.
