System Security... what exactly is it?

machikun808 said:

whs said:

I would like to add one major additional aspect to the security question. That is imaging. Anybody - even the most careful person - can run into system trouble for one reason or another. Very often you are then faced with the pain of reinstalling the system that throws you back to the state of when your PC came out of the box.
If you use imaging, you can go back to the state when you took your last image (I take one daily, but weekly would be the minimum I recommend). Have a look at this video tutorial. It explains one of the popular options: Imaging with free Macrium

So this program is like a back up and system restore am I correct? After installing windows 7, I never really backed up anything or should I say never really thought about it. Is that bad? I should start doing it. Will it be too late if I had BSOD's on my computer from a firewall?

Lack of imaging isn't bad... But it does hurt you (As it hurt me) when it comes to painstakingly getting your system back up and running to the way you want to.

In cases of Hard Disk Failure, or in some cases, having your computer get a really nasty virus/malware that corrupts your system to the point that you can't repair it... A more recent previous image will save you the headache of restoring your machine from being a good part of your day to only a few hours.

The drawback to imaging your computer is simply the amount of time it takes to back up your computer, external hard disk space and just simply not messing with the system in general.

Even with the current easier backup process that Win 7 offers, you want to not mess with the system to make backups a little more expedient. Shadow Copy, for instance, works wonders, but it also slows down while you are working with the system, making it doing disk activity while it is in the process of copying somewhere else.

The best thing you want to do is look at getting a nice USB/Firewire Drive for your system. Hook it up and schedule a backup over night, right before you go to bed or before you go to Work/School so you know you are going to slow it down yourself by accident. When it is done, shut it down and put it off to the side until the next backup time.

Size wise - Look for a drive that is going to be about at least 1.5 times the size of the amount of information you are backing up. You want to do basically a full system backup. If you do it on a daily basis like the guy above, you want to do a Weekly or Monthly Full System Backup and incremental backups for the dailies. The incrementals will be small backups that add to the Weekly or Monthly backups.

The only other thing to be wary of is keeping track of changes... Depending on how many full copies you keep, can also be a life saver when it comes to dealing with some malware/viruses... If you have only a backup that is at most a week old or a day old... And you got infected over a week ago and just now found out... It will be hard to avoid a reinstall in most cases.