In all these years I have NEVER used a darn "Recovery Disk" anyway.

The reason is that these "Recovery Disks" do not actually "recover" your data, your programs, your setup nor anything else that is of any real value to a user, they just wipe the hard drive and reinstall whatever version of Windows that shipped with the computer when new. Without any of the updates.

Now that we have the USB drive option so readily available and so inexpensive, comparatively speaking, the use of a good imaging program and periodically making a new image of the whole shebang is very good insurance.

And should anything bad happen to your C: drive, your OS, etc. - getting it all back to square one is rather painless, costing only a bit of time for the transfer.

For those who don't want to go through that kind of thing, there are also now other methods readily available, such as "Carbonite" online backup systems, costing aprox $50US per year. I use Carbonite on the day job computers, but have not installed it on my music making DAWS simply because I want nothing possibly interrupting the music to call home on the internet and such. That said, I do part time work at a nearby recording studio and they use Carbonite on their Macs and report no problems.

The one thing I've noticed about keeping my own backup drive images:

The only time you will actually *NEED* the image drive to restore your precious "stuff" -- will be on the one machine where you haven't taken the time to make that drive image.

Of course.


--Mac

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