"When Microsoft announced Windows Home Server earlier this year, it was greeted with a mixture of curious disdain and eagerness. Some questioned what the product offered over existing solutions, while others welcomed it with open arms. It's at once hard to explain and easy to understand what Windows Home Server is, but it's worth getting to know the newest addition to the Windows family."
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Member since:2005-07-06
"I don't know if it's really necessary to back up/image an entire Windows system."
It's necessary if you want downtime to be as short as possible in the event of a hardware failure. Restoring an entire imaged OS is much faster than reinstalling the OS, then reinstalling your apps, and finally setting up all of your preferences again.
I personally don't mind reinstalling in the event of a crash, but the vast majority of people want a system back up and running in as little time as humanly possible. The only files I back up at home are My Docs (of course), App Settings, and Local Settings. That's enough to get a system back to an identical state after the OS is reinstalled.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
I keep an image of my machine, because if a drive dies (and it has) I don't really enjoy spending 4 hours loading Windows, patching, installing apps, and restoring data.
I have gigabytes upon gigabytes of samples for audio work, and it's just easier to re-image to that baseline, and then restore the most recent docs.
Member since:2005-08-26
I'm with the others on imaging. I image my laptop and it has been great in the past such as when it needed to get sent in for repair. I didn't want to both risk losing it all anyway and I didn't want the techs looking at my stuff without having to work for it a bit. When I got it back, I just restored the image and I was good to go.
Member since:2005-07-06
you don't have to use tweakUI to put My docs on a separate hdd or partition.
Just right click on 'My Documents' click on 'properties' then change the target folder location.
Half the crap people use 3rd party apps for can easily be done in just a few clicks with the default Windows apps... 
Member since:2005-07-06
TweakUI is made by MS, so I wouldn't really consider it 3rd party, but you're right; you can right click on My Documents and redirect. This doesn't cover your desktop and app settings though. I don't know if TweakUI addresses that or not, as I've never used it for that purpose.
Member since:
2005-11-13
I don't know if it's really necessary to back up/image an entire Windows system. Just use a program like TweakUI to make your Documents and Settings folder (and other relevant folders) map to a separate partition, and just back up that. Sort of like how you might back up your /home directory in Unix.
But then again, I suppose the people who know this aren't who this product is aimed for