After clean re-installation of windows. is AV and internet security the first thing I should install before connecting to the internet?
Hi, you are already protected - Defender and Windows firewall.
The first thing you should do once Windows is running ok is start using disk imaging. Why?
Here's my write-up on the value of disk imaging.
Everyone who contributes regularly here uses and recommends disk imaging.
If you use it, you can recover from:
- a failed disk drive (restore to a new one)
- ransomware (which encrypts your disk)
- user error
- unrecoverable problems from failed updates to problem programs
- unbootable PC (hardware faults aside)
Images also act as a full backup- you can extract files too.
You can even use images to help you move more easily and quickly to a new PC.
Can be used with Laplink software to transfer your build automatically to another PC
Imaging can even help you sleep at night knowing you have a second chance.
Creating disk images lets you restore Windows and all your imaged disks and partitions to a previous working state from compressed copies you have created and kept updated on external storage media, quickly and probably without technical help.
Many here recommend Macrium Reflect (free) as a good robust solution and more reliable than some others. It’s
- more feature rich
- more flexible
- more reliable
than Windows Backup and Restore system images.
It's well supported with videos, help and a responsive forum.
There are other such programs, free/commercial, some with simpler interfaces, but Macrium R is one of the most robust and reliable.
How long does it take?
SSD+ USB3 - maybe 15 mins for the first system image, less thereafter
HDD + USB2 - maybe 40-50 mins
That’s with little personal data, few programs installed.
- of course, depends how much you have on C:
(You can and should image all your partitions and disks)
Once you've created your first image, keep it updated with e.g. differential imaging- which images just changes from the first image, more quickly, and creates a smaller image file.
You need a backup medium - say- twice as large as the total amount of data you are imaging to keep a reasonable number of differential images. This will vary dependent on the number of images you keep, so is only a rough practical guide.
Some comment that system restore isn't always reliable; if it works and solves the problem, great. But sometimes restores won't work or fail. And of course a restore point only covers a limited number of aspects of the system. That’s where disk imaging comes in.
(There's a tutorial on Macrium in the Tutorials section, and a couple of videos in the user videos section on this forum)
Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect Windows 10 Backup Restore Tutorials
https://www.tenforums.com/general-su...tml#post355809
I've heard about imaging before, but my understanding about imaging is that whenever I am experiencing system error or unrecoverable problem or simply just because I want to clean install the whole windows again, I don't have to go through all the mess of installing the windows and setting up things again, isn't it?
I don't understand why I should keep updating the "image" when chances are that the next day or next minute after I reinstall windows I will get infected with virus or malware, then in that case I will also add the virus or malware state into the image isn't it?
Any you said I should image all my partitions and disks?
Isn't imaging usually for the system drive? Why should I image other disks? All my other hard drives are mainly for storage of photos, videos, text files, pdf, etc. If I already have a backup solution for those drives, can I avoid imaging?
Last but not least, I just looked at the website of Macrium and understand that it can could schedule regular imaging of the system, but there may be a lot of changes I've made to the system between two scheduled backups for example, installing a new application, making changes to a couples of documents saved on desktop etc... when the PC happens to get infected and I restore to the last image, then the new application installed and changes made to the documents will be reversed right? In that case, will it cause a lot of inconvenience?
You can use something different for backing up your data files - such as cloud storage, or a Raid array (redundant drives). Ideally, data storage should be in two places that get updated every time you change a data file. Something like One Drive will watch a folder on your drive and each file that changes gets uploaded to One Drive online. Windows 10 also has a built-in file history monitor that you can set to copy files from a folder to a backup location when the files change. In a mirroring RAID or storage space array, two or more drives get written to at virtually the same time and each drive is separately replaceable if it should fail.
Ideally, you should create an image of your OS installation every time you make a successful major change to it (or it gets a major upgrade from Microsoft). For example, you do a clean install, get all the settings set, get your software installed, and your ready to kick-off really using the system. That would be a good time to make an image. Nearly every Tuesday Microsoft pushes a cumulative update. So Monday night would be a good time to update your image so if the update pushed by Microsoft on Tuesday crashes the computer you only lose a few hours of whatever might have changed.
On my major laptops and desktops I have two drives permanently installed. An SSD for the running OS and a spinning HDD for data and backup imaging. I also have a NAS (network attached storage) Raid (with two mirrored drives) for my data. My data that is in use, I usually use off the HDD, but it gets backed up to the NAS. Archived files such as photos and movies just get stored and used from the NAS. I make backup images to the internal HDD to speed things up. Once a month or so I will copy the backup image from the HDD to the NAS.
A key aspect to this is planning where things are going to be on your various disks and partitions.
The partition most at risk is your Windows partition.
So don't put your personal data there. Put it on a different partition or disk as far as reasonably possible. Why? So if you have to restore your Windows partition, your personal data is as little affected as possible.
Now, disks fail. They go wrong. Like any piece of hardware. A convenient way of restoring any disk is to have an image of it. But as you say, if it's a data disk you don't have to image it- you can back it up by other means.
A disk image file can contain (e.g.)
- the set of partitions for Windows (4 for UEFI)
- any combination of partitions or disks you like.
Restoration: obviously when a difficult or impossible problem to resolve occurs, you restore an image prior to that problem occurring.
Of course this isn't foolproof - it depends how many, and which dates you can restore from from your image set- which depends on how many incremental or differential images there are in an image set, and their dates.
Macrium conveniently allows you to define retention rules, limiting the total size on disk of your image set. The base image- the first- may be much earlier than any differential image, for example.
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