Windows 10 October 2018 Update rollout now paused

zbook said:

How many images do you have at any one time? (What size approximately?)

I use Medium compression on Macrium for for System Images (doesn't include pictures, docs, music) and I get about a 50% reduction in size. So if c: was 100GB the image would be around 50GB.

Others can comment on what compression rate they use and the final size of their images.

Caledon Ken said:

I use Medium compression on Macrium for for System Images (doesn't include pictures, docs, music) and I get about a 50% reduction in size. So if c: was 100GB the image would be around 50GB.

Other can comment on what compression rate they use and the final size of their images.

I use medium as well that is the default.

jimbo45 said:

The late Stephen Hawking was worried that AI could cause an eventual Extinction Level event - causing Humans to die out -- more dangerous in the long term than Nuclear weapons, climate change, bad politics etc etc.

I'm not so pessimistic but AI needs to be very carefully considered -- even low level automation has huge implications for the next and future generations on employement and economics and if Humans don't use brains they will atrophy and we will wither away as a species.

We are always told that it's impossible to write bug-free static code (e.g. W10).
How is anyone going to write bug-free dynamic AI code?

Here's a recent Amazon fiasco:
https://itknowledgeexchange.techtarg...ets-cancelled/

A point to note, that code wasn't actually buggy (it used dodgy assumptions).

IMO, AI should be restricted to "personal assistant" roles (i.e. everyone should get an AI helper to help them do their job).
They should also be legally considered part of the person.

Warrants should be required before they can be "interrogated" (i.e. before 3rd parties can do data dumps).
Otherwise the "powers that be" would just use them to spy on everyone.

jimbo45 said:

Just consider even automonous trucks, cars and public transport alone -- how many people currently work in those sectors -- to say nothing of automating the manufacture and servicing of these vehicles. A lot of these are lower paying jobs e.g uber taxi drivers etc -- imagine the social problems if all these 100,000's of people were rendered unemployed and the tax base wasn't sufficient to pay unemployement etc --horrendous social problems possible.

If AI could be made to work say 50% as reliably as a human worker, the corporations/governments would sack almost everyone in seconds.

kado897 said:

I've only had one problem and that was with the File & Folder backup. It wasn't backing up small files that were in a directory with large files. I reported the problem and it was fixed in a couple of days. Never had an issue with imaging.

I have had an Image failure, but I suspect that was caused by a coincidental HDD problem (block failure?).

I created an Image of my music partition (I was sure that I verified it).
When I tried to use it to populate a new HDD, I got an error message.

I could mount the Image in Windows Explorer, so I manually copied the files.
Some of them had glitches, but the majority were OK.

zbook said:

How many images do you have at any one time? (What size approximately?)

I have clean install Images (Full).
I also have Images going back ~12 months (Full and Differential).

The total size spread over multiple drives is ~8 TB (including my personal data obviously).

Caledon Ken said:

I use Medium compression on Macrium for for System Images (doesn't include pictures, docs, music) and I get about a 50% reduction in size. So if c: was 100GB the image would be around 50GB.

Other can comment on what compression rate they use and the final size of their images.

I did some testing a while back I found in most cases high compression hardly compressed much more than medium and took a lot longer to backup.

The other option is no compression which is basically same as cloning but in a wrapper. This was actually quite fast but much more disk space used.

The interesting thing in my tests was that on MY device, the CPU speed was more the limiting factor than the hard drive speed as the maximum write speeds were always just about in the hdd range even though I was using an ssd.

I would actually need a faster CPU to push the advantage to an SSD.

My overall comclusion was medium compression was a good tradeoff between size and time to backup. Going to higher levels just is not worth it.

I backup to HDDs and it can put quite a load on them. Disk is almost unusable at that time. CPU hardly notices.

cereberus said:

I did some testing a while back I found in most cases high compression hardly compressed much more than medium and took a lot longer to backup.

The other option is no compression which is basically same as cloning but in a wrapper. This was actually quite fast but much more disk space used.

The interesting thing in my tests was that on MY device, the CPU speed was more the limiting factor than the hard drive speed as the maximum write speeds were always just about in the hdd range even though I was using an ssd.

I would actually need a faster CPU to push the advantage to an SSD.

My overall comclusion was medium compression was a good tradeoff between size and time to backup. Going to higher levels just is not worth it.

That's my experience too.

winactive said:

What CPU do you have? I checked your profile but it's....um....detailed.

AMD10 about four years old but CPU class is probably a little older. It is probably marginally more powerful than an i5 but not as powerful as an i7 of about 4 years ago. A more modern cpu would probably crate a Macrium image much faster and would become hdd limited (mine was on the edge) and then need a faster drive i.e. an ssd.

BTW I am backing up from one ssd to another. There would be a big penalty in backing up to a different partition on same physical drive with an hdd compared with SSD but that is bad practice anyway.

Of course compression is not impacted by CPU speed.