In article , x@y.Invalid 
says...
> 
> 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.


 I don't claim to be one of "Those who know" but I'll toss in my 2 cents 
worth. I have a Surface Pro, a laptop, my main workstation and a 3TB NAS 
(6TB total set up in a RAID 1 config) on a home network behind a Zywall 
firewall device. I do a monthly full disk image of the 3 computers to 
the NAS using Acronis True Image. I keep the last three months worth of 
those images at all times. I also do a daily data file backup to the NAS 
using Karen's Replicator. I set up several "Jobs" in Replicator that 
create mirror copies of several folders such as my Desktop, Docs and 
Pics folders, etc. on the NAS. Then once every 3 months or so I copy the 
NAS contents to a portable HD which I normally keep off premises. 

 Each of the computers is running NOD32 as a resident AV program. The 
laptop also runs a paid version of MBAM as a 2nd opinion scanner while 
my workstation runs a paid version of SAS as a second opinion scanner.



 
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