Windows 7: question about backing up

Why would you need to perform manual backups if you do system images for your backup indstead? Does system images take a snapshot of your whole PC including partitions with mp3s and video files in? so doesnt system imaging negate the need for using the backup tool in win 7?

might be getting a bit confused, really appreciate any info on this to help my understanding.



regards

You may want to do backups because you can't get certain files/foldders out of a system image (not easily). Also, if you reinstall Windows, then you can restore from backup and it will give you your music and pictures and documents. If you restore from a system image, it will erase your new Windows install and put the old one back on.

Some people image the entire system, but that takes a lot of time and space.
Personally, I think of an "image" as a copy of the OS partition,that can be recovered and get you running again as you were when you took the image.
Anything else is just a copy of files.
There are as many ways to "backup" data as there are people.
Here's what I do.
I image my OS partition only. To 2 different physical drives that don't contain the OS. I use Ghost 15 for that.
Everything else that I "can't lose" goes into a directory called D-Backups.
That gets synchronized onto to 2 different physical drives that don't contain D-Backups. I use Powerdesk sychronizer for that.
Once in a while I put the images and D-Backups on an external drive.
I do it all often enough that I don't get *too* uncomfortable.
But I get unfortable pretty easily, and if you don't, you should have a schedule.
I don't back up anything I don't care about or that I can recover by re-downloading or inserting a DVD/CD.
Not foolproof by any means, but it's worked well.
Just think about what you don't want to do (reinstall?) and what you don't want to lose (family photos?)
Then organize your partitions/drives/files to make it easy for you to have a backup plan that works for you.

Here are a couple of reasons:

1: Imaging has its own set of possible pitfalls. Imaging is a complex process that sits between you and your backups. Why would you want to place those possible pitfalls and complexities between you and your only backup? It's a fairly small risk, but why take it? This website is riddled with imaging problems.

2: Unless you make images daily or more often, any given image isn't likely to contain ALL of your data. The image you made on April 25 does not contain all those mp3s you made on April 27.

Not to mention the space consumed by images.

Many people keep their data on a separate partition, not on C. For those people, I don't see any reason to image the data partition at all.

If you keep your data on C, an image of C can act as one form of data backup, but I would personally never let it be the only form of backup due to reasons 1 and 2 above.