Windows 7 Upgrade: Network Backup painfully expensive

If you have a bunch of computers, you can now buy the "Windows 7 Home Premium" upgrade for $149, for three computers. I almost did that, but!

...if you want to backup all three computers to a network drive, you have to buy the "professional" version separately for each machine for $199 x 3 = $597.

The upgrade to the network backup feature ($149) costs more than the entire OS ($49). This is if you don't really care about BitLocker, joining domains easily, or having an easy way to install XP in a virtual machine, which I mostly don't.

Why is keeping good backups such an expensive feature? People care about their data, and Microsoft should care too.

Single external USB drives are a huge point of failure, and people should be allowed to use their external RAID NAS device they bought for $300, without paying additional humongous sums of cash to do it.

1 comment:

  1. Of course you are right! Backup should be included and simple enough that it is actually used by people.
    But saying: "Single external USB drives are a huge point of failure.." doesn't do them justice. You just shouldn't move the files to the external drive but instead copy them over and everything is great if the internal or external drive dies.

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