I have never had an easy time, when working on people's computers, with making the recovery disks via the Dell Datasafe Local Backup program.On several computers it would run, and burn data to the DVDs, and then in the verify stage of the first disc, it would freeze at 72 or 78% or thereabouts, and that would be it, my only choice would be to Cancel and try again (wasting yet another blank DVD and 20 minutes of my life). Well, today I was finally able to make a good set. I Googled around and found that
someone recommended setting the compatibility properties of the Datasafe program to Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (on a Windows 7 computer), and even though I did that, I still got the freeze during the verification procedure. But since I had heard the DVD drive spin down and not start back up, I opened the DVD drive and closed it again, and then waited a looong time, and it finally finished and asked for the second DVD (which burned and verified without an issue).
So I'm not sure if both of these things mattered or if just the eject/insert did the trick, but I'll do some testing on that next time.
Another note: the computer I was working was having major issues, and wouldn't even start Windows. I chose the Repair My Computer option, and the Dell Datasafe app ended up making a backup of documents, music, pictures, etc. (and this was all customizable), and saving it on my C: drive, then it reformatted (without affecting the backup somehow) and reinstalled everything to the factory state. Then I just opened the backup (at c:\emergency) and the Datasafe Local Backup program led me through a restore. That was impressive.
