Now you have done it, some here may shave to start memorizing their data and not use a computer at all for total security. ;~)
As you have said, it is all relative. The only true way to be secure is to never place your thoughts anywhere other than in you head. Don't use a recorder, computer, telephone, paper, etc., if you have something to hide.
But for the rest of us that don't have a photographic memory, what I said originally works for me. And yes it had been implemented, and used to replace the primary drive recently with out hours/years of preparing for that. Life is way too short for me to be worried about hiding something that really really is not likely to be viewed in a way that will cause me problems, if it were ever to be viewed unknowingly.
I am a unix/linux guy. But I still use MS. Just way more available. The problem with Linux is that there are too many distros. Originally everyone thought it would solve the UNIX flavor problem. But every company and every body and their brothers, sisters and idiot brothers decided to do it differently. And to some extent that has killed Linux.. The original goal is gone..
Stuff that works on one distro doesn't work on the other. I can't be bothered ... My son loves Linux.. But even he keeps a copy of MS around because he knows it's a necessary evil... Either that or Apple, and he does not like Apple.
But you need to be a "high interest target" for one of those institutions to invest the time and resources to "plant" one of those devices on your computer - and technically, when one is planted in your computer you ARE connected.
I had certain things that would have cost me to re-license, also some complex items that had inter dependencies and would not register correctly. I did not have the exports of those items needed to rebuild them.The export would provide the way to get back even with different keys ... But without the logical export I had would have to use the original keys, which would not match the current install.
I had done a fresh install, and was striking out trying to get some things working. Just too many gotchas.
Being un-employed I can't afford to buy the software that I already paid once for. Some companies allow you to continue to download older software, but some don't, requiring you to purchase the latest version... so I was screwed. I could not find all the original downloads and installers. I thought I kept them, but was not able to find them all, could be I didn't recognize the name of the installer package.
I was able to move to my wife's laptop for a while, basic stuff mail, MS office, but I didn't even try to get my cygwin (ksh,bash) shells/X stuff running, knowing I didn't want to modify everything twice.
You don't realize how much customization and unlocking of things I have done too. That takes quite some time to do. This is all manual. I could not remember all of those. I rebuilt my xp system over and over from scratch... I had the safety of a ghost system to get me out of trouble. And I could rip through a fresh install and customize most of it within a few hours. With W7 it's a little different. Some things are hidden in less obvious places. And it takes quite a bit to unlock them. In the few days on my wife's W7 I still hadn't been in a comfortable mode. I probably should build a registry file to modify many of the individual registry changes.. I did that for some of the xp stuff. But have not for the WIN7 system.
I disable tons of MS stuff, services and stuff that are not necessary. Its a pain to go through this just to get a fresh install. I don't need it. I operate very efficiently most of the time. Do you realize how many services are running that you don't need or use?
I have some free software too that I use. For 2 of them the new versions don't do the same thing as the old versions. For some reason some of the features were removed. I kept trying to figure out how to get back to a feature in one of the programs. Never found a way to turn it on.. well in the old, it's just there, no way to turn it on/off. The new version... it's not there. I use these features.
I am installing new drivers for this laptop, as some are now out of date with the new hardware.
No this was a win win restoring. First I am back to a very comfortable env. 2nd, I won't be worried about something that's not working later.
3rd, I have my dbs up and running, so I didn't lose my data, and now that the town wants to audit me for vb that's welcome.
And I now know how to get it back for next time. Now if I want to start from scratch, no problem, I have a way to get back.
It's taken me five days (or more) to do a clean install, by the time I got everything working and tested, but it's never taken me more than a couple of hours to do a restore from a backup. That would piss me off, no end.
Well the reason that it took 5 days was that I lost 3 days while I went to my sons graduation from college.
Magna cum Laude... in computer science. A chip off the old block.
So that was Fri, Sat, Sunday lost. I forgot to mention that in previous posts.
The big problem was that I needed an update, once I had that the restore worked. But I had to rebuild the o/s again, since the first time MS did not partition the GPT partitions for some reason... no idea why it skipped that process.
I guess it is a matter of whether you are prepared to do a clean reinstall or not.
I have obliviously thought this out. I was never ever confident that I could restore anything/the OS and data after a back up. There was always something that might come up. Like the need for a totally new computer. I just did not want to put the time in it any more.
So I keep a copy of all of my program install files and data on a separate HD and all of that gets backed up to iDrive, I used to use Carbonite.
I did do a complete clean reinstall back in Feb~March, a new SSD Primary drive, and it took me 2 days to get back to where I wanted to be and working at my leisure.
AND I had a relatively clean set up again.
What would piss me off to no end is to reinstall an image and it not work for what ever of a hundred reasons, and still might have the problem that caused the need to do this in the first place.
Well you get a pass. ;~) You can't count those days. And a great reason to be away.
LOL. My son was Suma cum Laude in accountancy. He is my retirement plan. ;~)
It is always something and your situation was one of many possible problems that can crop up. The last time I had a successful full recovery from a backup was when the back up and restore began at the c:/ prompt. That was way before Win 95. I wonder how many 3.5" floppies it would take to back up 150 Gig? LOL
Leon wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Probably more disks than AOL mailed out!
Can you imagine how long it will take? It'll probably be faster just to print out the bit patterns on a modern laser printer and scan them in again. *g*
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