Backup Before Installing XP SP2!

I was reading an article by Frank J. Ohlhorst in CRN (www.crn.com) about Windows XP, service pack 2. Microsoft made a whole lot of changes in this service pack, and Frank offered the seemingly obvious advice: "A backup before installation should be considered a requirement before installing SP2." Installing a service pack might break something, so you want to be able to fall back to the previous state of your machine.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to believe this is the sort of great advice nobody takes. You really need to have some kind of image backup to easily rollback a misbegotten service pack. Image backups are not the norm, and are becoming more rare as hard disks get bigger without transfer speeds getting much faster. It's a great example of how computer backups are in a no-really-great-solution stage right now.

You can read Frank's entire article online.

June 18, 2004June