NT wrote
fred wrote
NT wrote
The Natural Philosopher wrote
fred wrote:
NT writes

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.
Usually things dont go that wrong, and if they do I tended to want
a different setup anyway. With xp and on if you upgrade hardware at
the same time, it wont work anyway. So it all gets a bit pointless.

Useful in the case of a system drive doing bad, it means a system
can be back up and running in short order. The OS & apps image
fits on a DVD so it's easy to have one in a drawer just in case.

Thats mainly why I did at one time clone. But it was
never used in practice, there are too many ifs & buts.

I have used clones repeatedly, mainly when doing a complex reinstall
where I need to keep going back to the original install thats got too
screwed up to be viable, as I keep checking on the apps configs
so I can manually get the settings back to the way they once were.

Works fine.