On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 08:00 AM, Steve Nutt wrote:

Personally, I wouldn’t restore or backup an image, too much to go wrong, even on the same hardware.

To each his or her own.  I'd rather gnaw off my own fingers than set myself up to have to reconfigure a machine and all its software after a drive failure.

I think I've had one restore in over 30 years not work, so your assertion about "too much to go wrong" just doesn't hold water in my professional experience.  If these suites were commonly problematic, they'd have died out long, long ago.  They're generally very slick, easy, and, most importantly, fast at getting a machine right back on its feet to precisely the state it was in when the full system image backup was taken.

That being said, you bring up another good point is that in addition to full system image backups, one should also be taking separate user data backups.  The File History utility in Windows 10 is an excellent tool for this.  Most backup & recovery suites also include a function strictly for user data rather than full system images as well.
 
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Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 1909, Build 18363  

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.
       ~ Lawrence Krauss