System Image Backup

[LeeB]

What is it? Is it a worthwhile thing to have? 

[Ianab]

Basically it's a "snapshot" of your hard disk taken at a certain point. You put this snapshot on a removable hard disk or similar, and pop it in the top drawer.

Now if something really bad happens (disk failure / virus / windows randomly pooping itself) you pull out the disk and can quickly do a restore of the whole disk and get you back to where you were at the point when the system crashed. 

If you only backup your important data, then you have to reload windows, reinstall your various programs, then restore your data from their backup (removable media or cloud). This is a lot more work. 

Worthwhile? Depends how complex your machine would be to set up again? I don't bother on mine as it's running Linux and reloading the system is relatively quick and painless, and all the software I have is also a matter of ticking some boxes and automatically downloading them. So I only have backups of my data files. Recovering from a dead hard disk might take ~30 minutes on my system. A more complex Windows setup, you might take 1/2 a day to get it set up again. 

[lxskllr]

Half day for a windows reinstall is pretty optimistic Ian. I've spent 8 hours on it for other people, got tired of waiting and left. Come in the next day, and the computer's locked up :bangshead:  They have the most brain dead update mechanism. I can't imagine what it could possibly be doing, hammering all resources simultaneously, and telling the user nothing. Is the machine locked up? Is it thinking? Who knows??

I keep /home backed up, but that's about it. I got a new machine earlier this year, and it was the first time moving my drive over didn't work. Kept getting grub errors. With enough persistence, I could have figured it out, but I went with a reinstall. Kind of nice getting rid of accumulated cruft. I had been running that since 2009, updating as I went.

Anyway, Clonezilla's a good program for doing images. It's console based, so it can be intimidating for non techies, but if you take your time and read what's on the screen, it's pretty straightforward.