We Need to Discuss Windows Backup (Premium)

I've written a lot about backup and sync this past year and so I was interested to see Microsoft releasing a new Windows Backup app. Perhaps it's time to put this thing in perspective by understanding what it is that Microsoft is trying to achieve and, spoiler alert, where it still falls short. And then we can move onto what it should become. And I have big ideas for that.

This will require a bit of context. Fortunately, I have lots of content I can reference.

In Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium), I briefly discussed how the world has changed since we used to connect a USB hard drive to our PCs and create system image backups that we could use to fully restore those PCs back to some point in time. The problems with these systems are many, among them that you don't get a truly clean install of the operating system when you restore a system image backup, and you lose out on the resulting performance improvements. The backup could contain malware, the wrong versions of files, and other issues. And this type of backup predates our modern and mobile world: If you aren’t in the same physical location as the backup, you can't use it.

I then laid out my three-part method for achieving the best of a system image backup while avoiding the major downsides of such a system. And while I wish this system had a pithy name of some kind, it's explained easily enough: You can use Reset this PC or the Windows 11 install media to clean install Windows, OneDrive to sync your documents and other important files, and Windows Package Manager (winget) to bulk install all of the applications you need. (And, optionally, a third-party app called WingetUI to keep those apps up to date going forward.) What you achieve here is the restore part of the backup/restore cycle, across your OS, data, and apps.

Implicit to this system, by the way, is that you're going to sign into Windows using a Microsoft account (MSA) or, less likely but just as good, a Microsoft Work or School account, one that is based on Entra ID (what used to be called Azure Active Directory, or AAD). (I will just write this as MSA now to simplify the discussion.) There are numerous advantages to using an MSA sign-in, but for the purposes of this discussion, the key advantages are Windows settings sync, automatic sign-in with the Microsoft Store and all Store apps, and automatic sign-in to OneDrive with its file system integration functionality.

And when I think about all of these tools---and God help me, I think about them a lot---I see the makings of an even better backup/restore system than the one I outlined in that Windows Time Machine article. After all, with the exception of that one optional third-party tool, everything in my backup/restore system comes free with Windows (or is available for free as a download, as with the Windows install media). And that one exception is something Microsoft should add to Windows: Winget is great, but command line tools are intimidating...