And that's that.

Yay. I still think the universe of Home Premium users that have ever run Windows Backup (or even know that it exists) is tiny. But huzzah anyhow.

By the way, when can we have Exchange backup back?

Exchange backup on a client OS? Unlikely

I live on 64 bit basic editions i.e. Home Premium so this is very good news!

Yay Microsoft! You've made the right decision!

It was always there to begin with, they've simply clarified their verbage on the matter.

So is there going to be 3x ultimate package?

Sorry Toms. Microsoft never gave out wrong information. You simply miss-reported and never corrected yourselves.

I'm not bashing Windows, but didn't people turn off automatic back-ups anyway in XP because malware could hide on your hard drive in old back-up files?

No, That was system restore, not Microsoft Backup. Now, if only people would use it....

well, thats better than vista then, because home premium flavour of vista didn't come with full backup and recovery... funny how no-one made a huge deal out of that...

I didn't see the confusion... the fact that it was just network backup that was limited was pretty obvious from the original page. Not to mention the quotes that tom's provided in their own article...

Sorry... still sucks... why not give network backup to everybody? I mean... it's "backup" right? Should mean: secure and easy. So that's a bad point to make extra money. Especially when there will be Win7 Home Premium Family Packs that could use this functionality very well...

Vista Home Premium does come with backup software, it is just not "full backup and recovery" as in image recovery from hard drive crash like it is in win7 (I believe). It replaced Microsoft backup that was in XP. Nobody made a hugh deal out of it because it wasn't missing from one version, it didn't exist in any version.

[citation]I still think the universe of Home Premium users that have ever run Windows Backup (or even know that it exists) is tiny..[/citation]
I know someone that uses it because he downloads too much porn and sometimes get viruses from it

This is an excellent example of bad journalism.

The original story was simply false, and it took some 3 weeks for its author to post a new story containing the correct information, albeit without acknowledging his own original error.

Even more incredibly, the author has not yet posted a correction within the original story. It is still up there, headlined "Windows 7 Home Premium Won't Have Backup," continuing to this day to misinform all who may read it.

Apparently, the author took little care before posting the original story. For example, it is apparent that he did not carefully read the available Microsoft site information, did not contact Microsoft ahead of time, did not carefully search the internet for the correct information, and did not actually test the pre-release version of the product. Evidently, he simply misread the information posted on the Microsoft site, and then leaped to his incorrect conclusion. Further, his latest story rather pathetically tries to shift blame to Microsoft, after it changed its site wording, in an attempt perhaps to idiot-proof its site information.

Here is the link to the original false and still uncorrected story. If you will read all of the comments, including my own, to see the various attempts made by many readers, including myself, to correct the story. The comments also show the degree to which this story misinformed its readers (and indeed will no doubt continue to do so, for it is still present on the site, with no annotation that its basic claim is simply false).

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/W [...] ,8261.html

Here are some links to a responsible site, at which you could have read the correct information, several weeks before the Tom's Hardware author provided you with the incorrect "news."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1031
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1031&page=2
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1031&page=5

So it goes...