Per Wolf K:
>FWIW, I haven't had as serious infection since Windows 2000. But that 
>one was a doozy, took me 2-1/2 days to eliminate, I couldn't flatten and 
>rebuild because of precious data. Since then, I back up must-keep data 
>to external drives, so if system has been trashed I flatten and rebuild 
>without data loss.

Some years ago - when I had a teenager banging on my PC a couple hours
every day - I went adopted a policy of never saving data to the System
drive.   Always partitioned the internal drive to C: (System) and D:
(Data).

I soon discovered that, even in my determination, I was managing to save
data to the System drive - not much, but enough....

So I added one more twist: before re-imaging, I take a temporary image
via a utility that allows browsing the image later (I use ShadowProtect,
but there are others - some free).   Then, if I remember to take the
temp image before restoring from the "Good" image, I'm covered against
my own foulups.   Of course, sometimes I forget to take the temp
image....-).    There's a place for a written procedure with checkboxes
here....

For data backup, I do incrementals to a 1-TB drive that I rotate out at
the beginning of each month.  Six drives...    Not my favorite scheme,
but the backup utility I've gone over to (Macrium Reflect) needs to have
the Full backup and all incrementals on one drive.

My preferred backup scheme was a file copy utility called SecondCopy
which let me swap out drives at will; but it got weird under Windows 7
and I gave up on it.
-- 
Pete Cresswell
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2