The Windows 10 Backup system is, as I have now discovered, a total fkuking mess. Do you know that it has no verification pass? It is very VERY lucky that I'm a backup freak and and had the means and the knowledge to recover my lost data.
In short, by means of injudicious farting around I managed to hose the Data drive of my old Windows7 box - nothing irreplaceable and it had all been copied to the Win10 box anyway - ho-hum says I, "That's what backups are for" and point the Win7 Restore at the NAS. Windows Backup goes into a sulk and says that one of the zip files is corrupt, "Ah well" says I and try an earlier set. Same complaint. Now I'm getting faintly irritated - those are good WD Red 3TB drives in that ReadyNAS box in RAID 0 - this shouldn't happen. But I do have a backup of the NAS box on a removable drive in the safe (monthly just to be sure). Paranoid? Moi? [I grew up when hard drives constantly had to be realigned because the stepper motors drifted and if you didn't have a pile of stiffies with your backups on them you were in deep doodoo].
And that drive just happened to one that I
didn't have an image of....:-(
So I hook up the backup backup and try to use that. But no, Windows is so stupid that it expects the backup to be the only directory on the drive (there's other stuff there)and says no, it can't find the backup. Nor does it give me the chance to point it at the right directory, it just says "No Backup present" and stops.
By good fortune I finally remembered the old DOS "Assign" command* and by some miracle Microsoft hasn't taken it away - a few keystrokes and I'm in and away.
But a Backup system that can't be set to verify! And a Restore command so dumb that it can't trawl through a drive and find it's backups! God give me strength!
Next to Winblows Linux is a dream - everything is a file, and if I want to store my data somewhere unusual Linux doesn't care, so long as I leave a pointer behind. The actual Windows OS is such a tangle, with hidden redirects all over the place, half of which are buried in the depths of that enormous briar-patch that they call the Registry and with each reiteration it gets worse. And don't get me started on the Start Menu - try and organise it into something meaningful (OS Tools in a Toolbox, Imaging stuff in an Imaging Folder, etc.) and SFC and DISM start whining that the system is corrupt! They're just shortcuts fer Chrissake! Gahhhhhh!
So by-bye Windows Backup - I'm moving over to Macrium for system images and EaseUS for backup - at least they can tell me straight away if something ain't right.
There's an old saying that a backup isn't a backup until you've done a successful restore - how true, how true.
And a great fat middle finger to you for the New Year Satya Nadella and Bill - just stick it where the sun don't shine!
Mac
PS: Happy 2017 to all of you and me, 'cos frankly 2016 for me was ferkin' AWFUL