Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

You can’t play games with this virtual controller. After all, it only emulates a handful of buttons and some simple navigation controls. But with the Xbox 360 being used more and more for entertainment experiences of all kinds, Xbox Companion is a great way to interact with that content on the console, and to find games, videos, music, and more.

Figure 10-27:The Xbox Companion virtual controller

With Windows 8 aimed squarely at a Metro-styled future, it’s no wonder that the new Windows 8 game experiences are Metro-based as well. This version of Windows offers a stunning array of games of all kinds through the Windows Store, provides handy organizational features for those who wish to access their favorite games from the Start screen, and of course it integrates with Microsoft’s market-leading Xbox LIVE service for the first time, offering access to the full range of gaming and entertainment services that Microsoft previously provided only on its Xbox 360 console. There are also fun hooks in Windows 8 for controlling the Xbox 360 and finding content that can be played to the console, with your Windows 8 device acting like a big and sophisticated remote control.

• 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 backs up your crucial data but does so in a way that will survive hardware failures. It’s brilliant.

Windows 8 also reimagines PC recovery in ways that will astonish you. Thanks to the new Push Button Reset functionality that can return your Windows 8 install to its factory-fresh condition, complete with a new car smell, you can also quickly recover all of your data, settings, and Metro-style apps as well. And this process generally takes just minutes, not the half or full day such procedures would require with Windows 7 or the typical PC maker recovery solution. It’s night and day.

This chapter examines these technologies. In some cases, you will need to learn some new skills. Trust us, however; it’s worth doing.

We’re all about “new” here. But many Windows 7 recovery features do carry forward, mostly unchanged, in Windows 8. These include Windows Troubleshooting, the Problem Steps Recorder, System Protection, and System Restore.

While the details have changed fairly dramatically, PCs still interact with storage devices—hard drives, solid state storage (SSD), USB memory keys, and the like—the same as they ever have. That is, to enable the use of storage, the devices must be formatted with a filesystem and then assigned a drive letter so that Windows, or the apps and applications that run within this environment, can access their contents.

And go figure, FAT lives on today with a version of the system called exFAT that is used almost exclusively on flash storage devices.

Over the years, Microsoft’s filesystem technologies have evolved dramatically, first with MS-DOS–based filesystems built around the FAT (file allocation table) architecture that debuted in Microsoft Stand-Alone Disk BASIC way back in 1977. Originally designed for 5.25-inch floppy disks, FAT was evolved over the years to support different floppy disk formats and then hard drives of ever-increasing sizes.

When Windows NT debuted in 1993, it included a new filesystem called NTFS that had numerous advantages over the FAT-based filesystems Microsoft was still using in then-mainstream Windows versions. Without getting into the technical details, suffice it to say that it was more reliable, efficient, manageable, and, eventually even offered better performance though that certainly wasn’t true of the first few versions. It also supported much bigger storage devices than the FAT filesystems.

With Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft made NTFS the default filesystem for its OS, and in the intervening years, this filesystem has been regularly updated with new features and functionality, including support for encryption, quotas, file versioning, and much more. And in Windows 8, NTFS is still the default filesystem for storage devices, especially hard disks and SSDs. But that’s all about to change.

Concurrently with Windows 8, Microsoft developed a new filesystem that will one day replace NTFS. Dubbed the Resilient File System, or ReFS, this new filesystem is currently available only in Windows Server 2012, and then only for the file server workload. Moving forward, however, Microsoft will extend ReFS first to work elsewhere in Windows Server, including as a boot disk. And it will then move ReFS to the Windows client as well.

Microsoft has not yet revealed how or when that could happen. So it’s equally possible that ReFS support will debut in a future Windows 8 service pack or other update, or that it will simply be included in Windows 9.

Compared to NTFS, ReFS is an evolution, not a brand-new filesystem. So it retains complete compatibility with NTFS while offering automatic data correction and support for even larger partition/disk, file, and folder sizes, among other things. ReFS also works with the storage features discussed in this chapter, including Storage Spaces.

For now, just know that you will be using the NTFS filesystem almost exclusively in Windows 8 when it comes to large capacity storage devices like hard drives and SSDs, even though it’s possible in some cases to format them with FAT-based filesystems.

Storage Spaces works only with Intel x86/x64 versions of Windows 8, not with ARM-based Windows RT systems.

NTFS and other filesystems have their advantages, but the reliability of any filesystem is ultimately tied to the weakest link in the chain, the underlying storage hardware. It’s a simple fact of life that hard drives (and related storage devices) fail, and that when they do so, they often bring your data down with them.

Windows has used various technologies over the years to help overcome the inevitability of data loss. For example, Windows 7 includes a feature called Previous Versions that automatically stores document revisions so that you can later go back and resuscitate an older document version when needed. It also includes a Windows Backup utility that does a decent job of backing up important files, or even the entire PC.