I do complete images, Eddie. It's easy, just start it up while I'm doing something else, perhaps music on the other computer, and it takes care if itself.

Why, because if something messes up the system, I can get it back.

It's saved my butt a few times.

The worst was, I bought a guitar amp-sim/fx pedal, and with it came a CD with Cubase LE on it.

I hadn't tried Cubase in years, so I thought I'd give it a go. I did a disk image backup and then put the CD in and clicked 'go'.

The installation didn't complete, instead I got an error code (I forget what it said) and the computer locked up.

I did a Ctrl+Alt+Del and rebooted. The boot up was interrupted with a message on a DOS-like screen wanting to finish the installation. I typed the correct letter and it froze.

The next time I typed the abort letter and it froze.

I booted in the safe mode and it froze.

I popped in the rescue disk, and in after some time passed, my computer was exactly as it was before the installation attempt.

The CD-ROM went into the trash.

The way I understand it is the disk image makes a clone of the hard disk, so that even if Windows gets corrupted, I can restore the disk to its earlier state.

I have one of those toaster drives, so I can take the backup drive out, so any malware can't get to it, only turning the drive on and inserting the disk for backups.

Plus I keep a few disks from a once per month backup for quite a few months, in case a sleeper virus wakes up.

Also, I use SyncToy every night to back up all my important data on another external disk. That way I don't have to clone every day, and if I insert an old disk, I'd still have my new data.

I figure it's better to have and not need the extra protection than to need and not have it.

Notes ♫

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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