Preface
I really had no nightmare experience yet. Only once I had to reinstall my system because I had been playing around with my password to the point, that I locked myself out of the system. I do, however, consider that a useful experience, because it gave me a chance to change a lot in my setup.
Environment
I take care of 4 systems. My HP desktop and the wife’s Gateway laptop in our winter home in Florida. Then my Dell desktop and the wife’s HP laptop in our German summer home. The backup strategies are slightly different for each system – partly because I wanted to try out different strategies and also because of some of the givens.
1. My HP desktop
My main vehicle for backup is Norton Ghost. I take a Ghost image to an external disk on each Sunday night. I started out with a 250GB disk, but now I have upgraded to a 640GB disk. My images right now run at over 60GB for a root image and up to 46GB for a differential image. So lots of space is needed if I want to keep a reasonable history.
I do not backup my data separately. Here I rely on the Ghost images from where I can retrieve files and folders and if I need to get a file back that is younger than last Sunday, I use Shadow Explorer to get it from shadowstorage that I have fully enabled. For more information on that you can refer to my tutorial here:
http://www.winvistaclub.com/forum/wi...-explorer.html
2. The wife’s Gateway laptop
The setup here is very simple. She uses only AOL mail and AOL as web browser, plus Ebay and Word 2007. A reinstallation would be extremely simple. Most of the files that she treasures she keeps on an SD card (makes it easy to move between locations). So all she does is a weekly backup of her documents to a Maxtor One Touch disk with the Maxtor Manager. All it takes it to touch the button on the disk plus one click. This program also provides imaging functions, but we figured that it was not worth it.
3. My Dell desktop
The approach for this system is similar as for my HP desktop using Norton Ghost, except here I have a second internal disk to where I write my images. That is a lot faster than to an USB attached disk. Additionally – once per month – I write an image to an external USB powered disk that I disconnect after imaging and keep in a safe place. The logic for that is to make sure that I can still operate, even if my imaging disk gets attacked by malware (e.g. the MFT destroyed).
4. The wife’s HP laptop
This system is run like my HP desktop. Norton Ghost is used each Sunday plus an occasional excursion into shadowstorage to recover a lost file (that happens at times – or maybe it’s only because women sometimes change their mind - LOL). She still uses her SD cards for important files, but then there is also some stuff on that system that I sometimes put on. So a slightly different situation to the Gateway that I never touch – except when there is trouble.
Conclusion
The above strategies have worked pretty well up to now. I have done recoveries with Norton Ghost several times – but not because of malware or a system crash. There were reasons like once I could not uninstall a program, etc. In those cases, however, I have to always backup my data first because I might have made changes since last Sunday.
If you are interested, there is more information on Ghosting/Imaging in this thread that I started on another Forum:
Ghosting approaches - summary because of popular demand How-To Geek Forums