jbow
Active Disk Image, Acronis or any of those type of things will cover you.
I have been meaning to do this Jon. Do you know if Active DI can be used on several computers? I see that Acronis is cloud based and 49 bucks only covers one computer, they have a higher price for three computers but if Active is cheaper I'll buy another external drive for this. I am not sure how I feel about the cloud yet... not that I really have a choice in the matter overall.
Which one do you use? You are right... 10 minutes beats the heck out of 10 hours.
Thanks,
Julien
I've been using Active Disk Image for many years, mainly because it is so simple and contains most of the tools you need on the one default disk, you only need to install it to create your registered boot CD then you can remove it from your system. You can then image any computer you boot with the CD/DVD.
The thing with using optical media rather than a thumb drive etc, is that nothing can write to it so it is always going to be clean. Write the images to a removable drive that isn't connected when the computer is being used normally so the images stay clean too.
My days of hunting down the effects of a malware infestation are long gone. Life's too short. My W7 and XP partitions take 8 minutes a week to make and around 8 minutes to restore either one.
Make an image of when you've just installed your OS, one when you've got all your stuff setup and authorized then just make on going ones so you've always got a good reference to return to. I just keep the fresh installs and up to two months back which works out at around 160 Gigs for my setup. The 'Starter' version works fine for me for this purpose but if you wanted to transfer a raw image to another partition for instance you need the 'Standard' version or above.
I do use the images as well, often when I've gone "a tweak too far" or I don't like the look of something that's just recently happened...
