NT wrote
The Natural Philosopher wrote
fred wrote
NT wrote

I've also never seen the point in backing up windows. If you need
to reinstall it, do it the windows way. Yes its slower, but youre
asking for trouble otherwise, IME its just not worth cloning.

For a new machine I take an image after the windows
install and again after the major apps go on.

If it all turns to **** later then that saves quite a bit of time on the reinstall.

I did that at one time. But didnt use the images in practice.

I have at some times, and most recently when checking if what looked like
might be a quirk with the 64bit version went away with the 32 bit version.

They didnt.

Usually things dont go that wrong, and if they do I tended to want a different setup anyway.

You dont necessarily want to bother with a complete reinstall from scratch tho.

With xp and on if you upgrade hardware at the same time, it wont work anyway.

Thats just plain wrong. They most you ever have to do is a repair install as well,
and that much quicker than doing a full manual reinstall of the OS and all the apps.

So it all gets a bit pointless.

Not if you know what you are doing.

I normally use a clone even when moving to a completely new machine.

Saves a hell of a lot of farting around reconfiguring everything again.

I only do backups of data (inc the mail databases).

One thing I did to save time was to copy the apps in /program
files en masse, and just copy them straight back into windows.
Its surprising how many work fine this way - some will still need
reinstalling the windows way.

Hmmn, not sure on that one.

The way to backup your data is simply to add the 2nd drive,
control a c in one pane, control v in the other. Job done,
software pointless.

It is nice to automate the backup even if you do run it manually. I
wouldn't back up unless it was to an external drive, there are too
many things to go wrong with a drive in the same box. A usb-network
adapter is a nice way of keeping a usb drive nicely separated from
the main box.

Switching to linux makes this process easier,
this distro is a dream to install compared to win.

Windows has the apps.

I've only found one job linux apps didnt do as welll
as I wanted, so one app runs on wine. No problem.

Doesnt work for what I want to do for the PVR.

And doesnt work with a lot of stuff done from Access either.

Even stuff as basic as putting a reminder into what you use for
reminders from the hardware database with a warning that the
warranty is about to expire on some of the hardware etc.

Only two I couldn't do without, and they nestle nicely on a windows
virtual machine. That gets backed up in its entirety every night as
its 'just another linux file system' when all is said and done.

Unless you play windows real time games, there is no reason
to keep a windows bare installation if you don't want to.

..and so many reasons not to.