It is my understanding that if you back up with disk imaging software and do a complete restore, everything including the OS is restored. Computer IT folks, please correct this if I'm wrong.

I use Acronis, and I have a "toaster" hard drive docking station.

It hooks to the computer via a USB port, and you can insert and remove either desktop or laptop SATA hard drives in there.

This is what the toaster drive looks like loaded with a desktop and a laptop HD.



You can have scores of hard drives with different projects on them, store them in a safe place, and pop them in the toaster when you need them.

I do a daily backup with Acronis. It's a disk image with a few incremental additions. It rotates between a few of these so I always have the last half dozen or more backups available.

Then once a month I put another drive in and do a disk image. I have almost a years worth of images on that disk. This is cheap insurance. If I get a nasty virus, or ransomware, I can go back to an uninfected state.

I also backup data from my documents and other important folders using Microsoft/Windows' SyncToy software. I have it set up so that it looks at the designated folders on my computers HD, compares them with the identical folders on the toaster HD, and any changes made on the computer, get changed on the toaster. I do this every day too. I like it better than a backup because the files are uncompressed, and if I screw up something on the computer, say a song file I made changes to, I can just drag and drop from the toaster HD to the computer HD and it's fixed in a couple of seconds.

There is no need to go to Apple to make good backups. In fact, I'd say there are probably more good backup options for Windows than for Mac, simply because there are 20 times more Windows users in the world.

The only good reason to go Mac is if you like the Mac OS better or you depend on software that runs better on the Mac.

Your data is more important than your computer. Back up every day.

There are only two kinds of computer users, those who have had a hard disk crash, and those who haven't had a hard disk crash - YET.

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