Microsoft’s “Revolutionary” Restore Feature: About Fucking Time

Oh look, Microsoft finally grew a pair and decided that maybe—just fucking maybe—enterprise users might want to restore their machines when the latest Tuesday Patch turns their £2000 laptop into an expensive paperweight. They’re expanding Windows Restore to more enterprise devices, because apparently the concept of “backups” was too bleeding-edge for these arseholes until now.

This cloud-based restore bollocks is supposed to help IT admins remotely resurrect bricked systems without needing to physically touch the fetid machines. How convenient. Instead of walking over to Karen from Accounting’s desk and performing the sacred ritual of percussive maintenance with a baseball bat, you can now nuke her system from orbit remotely. Shame it doesn’t come with an “electrocute user” option, but I suppose that’s the “Premium Enterprise Plus” subscription tier.

The feature uses Windows Autopilot and cloud recovery to pull down a fresh image. Translation: instead of your shitty local network choking on a 4GB ISO, you can now watch your entire bandwidth get raped by twenty simultaneous “cloud restores” because the PFY pushed the wrong GPO again and bricked half the sales department. Progress, my hairy arse.

Microsoft claims this will reduce downtime. Bullshit. It’ll just give users another excuse to click on dodgy phishing links knowing that “the computer magic man can fix it in five minutes.” Five minutes my left nut. Have you seen the state of enterprise internet? We’ll be staring at spinning circles until the heat death of the universe while the cloud restore downloads 87 gigs of Candy Crush andtelemetry spunk.

And don’t get me started on the prerequisites. Intune enrollment, Azure AD, Autopilot profiles… It’s a fucking Rube Goldberg machine of cloud dependencies just to get back to a working desktop. When the apocalypse comes and the internet dies, you’ll wish you’d kept that PXE server and USB stick with a clean image, you short-sighted bastards.

Read the original bollocks here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-expands-windows-restore-to-more-enterprise-devices/

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Related Anecdote:
Reminds me of the time the Head of Marketing demanded I restore his laptop “without losing his browsing history” after he tried to torrent the entire Fast & Furious franchise on company WiFi. I told him cloud restore would wipe everything. He insisted we “call Microsoft” to do it properly because he “knew people.” I explained that Microsoft doesn’t give a flying fuck about his Vin Diesel fetish and their cloud restore wouldn’t either. He threatened to go to the CEO. So I accidentally tripped over the power cable to his dock. Seventeen times. While holding a particularly strong magnet near the SSD. Funny how those cloud backups don’t work when the hard drive is suddenly “mysteriously” demagnetized and the machine is at the bottom of the lift shaft. The PFY said it was the quickest “accidental” hardware failure he’d ever seen. We restored his machine from the cloud all right—straight into the river.

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