Chapter 11

Storage, Backup, and Recovery

In This Chapter

  • Understanding Windows 8 storage basics
  • Discovering, configuring, and using Storage Spaces
  • Enabling File History for automatic file backup and versioning
  • Using Storage Spaces and File History together
  • Using the Windows Recovery Environment
  • Creating a Recovery Drive
  • Using Push Button Reset to reset or refresh your PC
  • Accessing hidden system image backup and recovery functionality

In Windows 8, Microsoft has dramatically recast its storage and backup and recovery technologies while offering a familiar selection of other related tools that have appeared in Windows for years. This melding of the old and the new is, of course, a theme that runs throughout Windows 8, as is the notion of reimagining Windows itself. So while previous Windows versions included ways to recover data and the entire OS in the event of a disaster, in Windows 8 these tasks are more logically linked together. Because, after all, when you do have to resuscitate a PC, you want to resuscitate it all—your data included—and not just the OS.

To this end, Windows 8 includes technologies such as Storage Spaces, which keeps your data safe through hardware redundancy, and File History, a far more useful new take on the Previous Versions feature from older Windows versions that makes document and data backup and recovery automatic and highly graphical. Best of all, you can even combine Storage Spaces and File History into a single cohesive solution that not only ...

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