William Sommerwerck wrote:

Incidentally, nobody does backups until AFTER they've lost a massive
amount of data and correspondly massive amount of time and money.

Not I. I back up my hard drive periodically. When W2K "collapsed" several
years, I had full backup and lost nothing.

.... only the time to reinstall every single program. Does your backup
care for the bookmarks of your browser, the mails of your emailer and
so forth, which all happily sit somewhere else than in the "My Data"
directory?

The only real thing is a disk imager, working and tested - for your
OS, the hard disk size you use, and the file system you have :-).
To have an incremental backup, too, would be fine.

Regards,
H.