The current model of personal computing almost guarantees frequent occurrences of serious software-related problems. Spyware infections, mysterious application freezes, endless configuration issues are just a few examples of what happens to a regular PC user every day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we won’t see much improvement in this area until the whole software world moves back to the hosted model, where programs are maintained by the vendor in a secure, controlled environment. It seems like we are slowly moving that way, but so far nobody has proven that hosted web applications can deliver the same level of functionality, user experience, and hardware connectivity as the desktop applications do.

While we can’t do much about it, let’s at least deal with the problems in the meantime. Software issues are fixable, but what it comes down to is time needed to patch things up. It normally takes anywhere from a few hours to 2 days, even for an experienced technician, to reinstall all applications and redeploy data on a single PC.

There is a shortcut though. I while back I wrote two articles on the topic: The first one describes how to initially setup the PC file system so that it can later be backed up very easily, the second one is on performing the actual backup/restore procedure.