Backing up

[gothic]

I sit here trawling the forums some evenings and see all these problems that occur, machines that stop responding - new software installations that sieze machines up - all sorts. I know that for some problems there are facilities such as driver roll-back and system file checker and system restore, but I swear by Drive Image by Powerquest. My normal modus operandi with a new OS is to install it initially to experiment a little, you know....play around, finding all the new bits and just...well...playing.

Then I proceed to the FINAL installation. Setting everything up as I like it, configuring, installing all the software and making sure it's complete. I then drive-image it across to one of my spare partitions, and it's always there as a security blanket. I make sure that any programmes save directories are set to my backup directory, so if the image has to go back, I haven't lost any data.

It may seem extreme, and I admit it takes up a little hard drive space (about 1.2gig) but the number of times I have had serious problems, especially when I was on 98/Me, and just popped the image back on. So simple, everybody should do it.

 

[gaskill]

I'm with you gothic. I do the same thing, though with Symantec Ghost instead of DriveImage. I play around with my computer too much to think it'll run fine forever, so I have a near perfect setup with all the software I use installed and everything configured, and all my e-mail and personal files on another hard drive. It gives me a sense of security to know that if I hose the OS I can get up and running again in about 20 minutes, rather than spending a whole day configuring the system. It's well worth the 1.5 GB the image file takes.

Actually, I have a perfectly functioning Windows 2000 image backed up as well, though I don't know if I'll use it again. It's nice to have, anyway.