HEADLINE: OneCare Restore doesn't really help if you have hard drive failure - at least not for getting your PC back up and running. Instead it just helps save your personal files. That means most users really need another solution - doesn't it? (And thus OneCare Backup/Restore is a bit of a misnomer...)
This morning I'm back online. My hard-drive failed Sunday. I had a 160 GB drive and can't get my hands on another one until Thursdays... So I had to settle for a 120 GB drive in my notebook. Using Vista 32, my Windows backup would not work because the new drive was a different size. And of course OneCare is really a "file backup/restore" and not a "PC backup/restore" system. Meaning - if I have a hard drive failure I need to reinstall Vista (that's a pain... I have to call Microsoft)... Then reinstall all my software. (That's probably 3-4 days)... Then pull up OneCare and restore missing files?
This is from the Windows Live OneCare Backup and restore page:
"Keeping up-to-date backups helps protect your important data from loss or corruption due to accidental deletion, malicious attacks, or hard-disk failure."
I presume that "PC backup/restore" (robust, slap a new hard drive in, no matter what size) is not really something that would be offered at this price point? One would think that with all the Virtualization technology we have these days Microsoft could easily make a true "PC Backup/Restore" - restoring to a drive of any size (provided of course it's big enough to hold all the data).
So why do I say this? The name - Windows Live OneCare... "OneCare" leads users to think they really don't need any other sort of "care" when it comes to backup/restore. Perhaps the feature should be called "Photo and Document Protection"? Then users would not expect that they are "backed up" and ready to roll if their hard drive fails.
