I truly don't understand what MS finds so hard about backup. What people want is so simple and obvious - a separate copy of all their files, preferably their wh

I truly don't understand what MS finds so hard about backup. What people want is so simple and obvious - a separate copy of all their files, preferably their whole system image, somewhere else. And yet every version of Windows seems to screw around with it. I remember Vista came out and I thought a great way to migrate would be to do a full system backup and then I could restore back the personal files I wanted onto Vista. Nope - the backup system totally changed, the utiltity to restore files didn't even ship with Vista! I was left to manually use an old XP computer to extract and copy files across from my backup image. Then Win7 came and I started using the backup option there. But even with the full drive image I didn't quite trust it, so I also made intermittent backups using Macrium Reflect which creates a low level image of each partition. So then came the day when my wife chose the "recover my pc" from the boot menu and wiped everything. "No problem!" I thought, I will just Google how to restore a full system image to bare metal. Imagine my shock to discover that this is not a feature of Windows backup. Unless you make a "recovery disk" using a CD (this computer did not have a CD drive), you cannot reinstall a full system image!? So I installed from the Macrium partition image and it delightfully brought back our system in a matter of minutes. I've never been able to work out if this consistent incompetence is by design (to keep the industry of alternative backup solutions alive and avoid accusations of monoply / antitrust) or if they have some strategic or tactical reason to make sure noboby on windows manages to back up their computers (hey, 20% of all users who corrupt their hard drive just buy a new computer!) Whatever the reason, it is exacty this sort of thing that is driving regular consumers away from Windows and into the arms of Apple. I hope MS figures it out, because I am not fond of Apple either.