New
#1
Should I regularly back up my system using imaging?
Two questions in one I guess. I have two hard drives, an SSD for OS and a harddisk for data. As I have several pieces of software and hardware that require a great deal of manual configuration I was very pleased to discover Macrium since instead of having to reinstall everything in the event of a major crash or after running the PC for a year or so and seeing it slow down, I could install everything I wanted in one go, configure and image the drive with the OS onto an external hard drive. THis gave me a backup I could make from the image if I needed to without having to jump through all the configuration hoops. I've had to reinstall the OS drive from the image a couple of times and it's been great, a massive timesaver.
A year later and I have a year's worth of Windows updates, some new software installed, updates to the new software, and a few things I previously added that I've removed.
My first question is, should I bother making a new Macrium OS drive image that reflects my current PC configuration? On the plus side it would have all the Windows updates and all other software updates that have come since my last image (and the alternative would be if I had to reinstall from the existing image again, I'd have to manually do all the updates and there's the risk some might not install properly or conflict with other programs). I'd also not have to reinstall all programs I added since my lst Macrium image.
On the negative side, as time goes on and my PC fills up with clutter presumably it slows down and any image I make of a PC with six months of clutter will not be as speedy as an image made soon after installing Windows? Is there much point in making an image for the purpose of possibly restoring Windows if the Windows disk is not a fairly clean installation? Or is it a myth that a computer really does slow down after a year or two and you have to wipe the hard disk and reinstall Windows periodically to overcome that?
My second question is about the data hard disk. At present I just copy and paste everything to an external disk. Would there be any advantage to making a Macrium image to the external disk of my data disk instead of copying and pasting everything across? Could I be sure that the single Macrium image file that resulted contained all my files and folders, and if I subsequently needed to view or go back to a single file contained inside a massive Macrium image file on an external disk, could I do so from Windows without restoring the image?
Hope these questions make sense, thanks for suggestions.