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I also noticed that Windows 10 comes with “File History”. Should I use this as another means of backing up my files in addition to Macrium Reflect for system images or is it not really beneficial?

Thanks!

Nathan Parker

Thanks everyone for the info! I’m not on the Insider Builds on this machine since I use it for mission-critical school work, but I have a Windows VM I need to bring over I could put on the Insider track and begin testing these things. I will probably wait until the official “uninstall” option is added to these apps before tossing them just because it’d be simpler than going through PowerShell.

I was on a Windows 8 system a while back that had the option to remove just about all of Windows built-in apps like these, but it seems Microsoft tightened their grip with Windows 10. Glad to see the option is returning!

Nathan Parker

Great! Thanks for the info! Much appreciated!

Nathan Parker

Thanks for the info. I have a SmartThings setup, so I could pop a smart switch on the Drobo and set it to switch on/off on a timer, plus be able to override it in the SmartThings app or with my Amazon Echo if I needed to.

The Drobo shares are virtual, and while my Drobo has five physical drives in them (with dual disk redundancy enabled), I cannot specify which shares go to which drives, so it’s true two shares can be on a single drive (and it is still on a single physical device), so two drives may be better. I could even have one drive set to clone so I have a clone in addition to a nightly image.

Thanks!

Nathan Parker

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I’ll continue to evaluate security software solutions and see what works best for my setup. So far with Webroot+Windows Defender Periodic Scanning, I haven’t experienced any major system slowdowns, and no malware has shown during scheduled scans.

I will probably not use TS4/QuickHeal since it didn’t fare too well in the test results link above, and in personal experience, it did lead to some major system slowdowns on a high-end workstation I’ve worked on, so it’d probably fare worse on my Surface Book.

I definitely keep nightly images of my machine as I’ve learned from experience how precious it is to have them (once when a Dell rep corrupted the OS to the workstation I was working on!), and with System Restore, sometimes I’ve found it works, but sometimes it’s not 100% effective, so a system image is definitely the way I have to go for extra protection.

Should I keep Malwarebytes (even the free edition) around for on-demand scanning?

Thanks!

Nathan Parker

Thanks everyone for the info! My backups happen nightly to the Drobo NAS automatically. Is there a way to have the Drobo NAS auto-disconnect after the backups are completed and auto-reconnect when the backups are scheduled to run?

For the two drives, would it be best to use two Drobo shares or a separate physical drive such as an external USB?

Nathan Parker

What Rick posted is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for this! Has anyone attempted this in PowerShell, and did it work OK?

Nathan Parker

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

Sounds good about steps 1-2. Glad to know I’ve taken great measures there.

I thought the dummy standard account would be a good idea. I even gave it the clever name of “Company Admin” so a thief thinks it’s an admin account when, alas to them, it isn’t. 🙂

That would be the one area in which it would be an issue if someone were to pop the drive. Since the drive is an SSD inside the display unit, Microsoft hasn’t made these extremely “repairable”, so in order to swap the drive, it would take some effort, and they’d likely damage the Surface Book in the process unless they were extremely good with hardware repair.

I’ll look for that on the dock, although what’s strange is the Surface Book doesn’t just “dock” into the dock. It uses a power cable connector which seems that someone could easily in-plug, or cut the power cable to release the machine (although it’d be a “shocking experience”).

True about them carrying the machine around with a dock and cut cable looking suspicious.

I do use Macrium Reflect to image my drive to a Drobo NAS box in-house. The data is encrypted so if someone decided to steal the NAS, they still couldn’t get the data. I also backup online to CrashPlan Central if I needed to recover my data in the event of the largest catastrophe.

Nathan Parker

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

I checked out the AV-Test site. Surprisingly, I don’t see Webroot on there, although PC Mag heavily talks it up. Does anyone know how Webroot compares to other top-rated antivirus programs on there such as Trend Micro or Kaspersky?

I did see QuickHeal on there (which Thrityseven4 is just a custom-branded version of QuickHeal), and performance did score extremely low, and antivirus catching didn’t score as well as others, so it would probably be wise for me not to install TS4 on my system.

Nathan Parker

I think someone else already posted this fix earlier in the thread, but I had this same issue last night. These instructions got me back in business:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-update-stuck-downloading-updates

Nathan Parker