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A system snapshot for a personal computer is potentially a really difficult thing to restore (ex. you break the device and need a new one, unless it matches exa

A system snapshot for a personal computer is potentially a really difficult thing to restore (ex. you break the device and need a new one, unless it matches exactly restoring snapshot likely puts you in OS recovery mode). A volume snapshot if you're technical enough to split up OS and application data volumes on your local drive can potentially help but you still have registry or other issues. The best way to handle backups, from the perspective of a backup company CEO, is to backup your critical data, and that could include application configurations. Browsers support exporting your profile, good backup software let's you run a pre-backup job script and post-job script, so you can export your browser profile, lock certain files or folders during a backup, etc. to get a good recovery point while minimizing risk of data corruption. Way longer topic than a comment here. If you do want full system state, pick a hypervisor (Parallels, etc.) and then backup the full VM each time you power the VM down. It'll make for much larger backups so restores are slower and storing all the recovery points will cost you a bit more too.

jiggawatts 4y ago
This is 100% false and nobody should ever follow this advice. I use snapshots all the time because Windows uses them automatically to get complete and consistent backups. Snapshots are always better then no snapshots. Full backups are always safer than partial backups. It takes just ONE forgotten path or file to make a backup completely impossible to restore. Don’t be a smart ass with backups. Just don’t.
- bretpiatt 4y ago
  A full system snapshot is not 100% always the correct solution, data protection is complicated. An example hypothetical, you have deeply embedded malware and you're unsure when it infected the system, it could have been sitting latent for months. In this situation you have to restore back and lose months of application data or restore a recent snapshot and then try to remove the malware in a clean room. It is much safer and easier to start from a clean OS and then restoring only the data on the system which is much simpler to scan for infection and sanitize.
iggldiggl 4y ago
> A system snapshot for a personal computer is potentially a really difficult thing to restore (ex. you break the device and need a new one, unless it matches exactly restoring snapshot likely puts you in OS recovery mode). While I am sure the process has limitations, I think that modern Windows has some amount of flexibility there, because due to a defect I've recently had to swap out my mainboard + CPU, and the system booted up just fine. The most major issue was that with the default drivers Windows had reverted to, the Ethernet controller didn't work, which could have been a little bit of a Catch-22 (no internet without the correct drivers, and no correct drivers without internet), but in practice I just downloaded the drivers on a different device and transferred them over via USB.
- bretpiatt 4y ago
  Yeah, plug and play drivers are much better today than years ago, they're also still challenging in many situations. For someone with your technical skill level it's very manageable, most folks don't know what a mainboard is. To an average user it's much easier to work with restoring their My Documents (and if they need full system state have Parallels save VMs under that folder path).

jiggawatts 4y ago

This is 100% false and nobody should ever follow this advice. I use snapshots all the time because Windows uses them automatically to get complete and consistent backups. Snapshots are always better then no snapshots. Full backups are always safer than partial backups. It takes just ONE forgotten path or file to make a backup completely impossible to restore. Don’t be a smart ass with backups. Just don’t.

bretpiatt 4y ago
A full system snapshot is not 100% always the correct solution, data protection is complicated. An example hypothetical, you have deeply embedded malware and you're unsure when it infected the system, it could have been sitting latent for months. In this situation you have to restore back and lose months of application data or restore a recent snapshot and then try to remove the malware in a clean room. It is much safer and easier to start from a clean OS and then restoring only the data on the system which is much simpler to scan for infection and sanitize.

iggldiggl 4y ago

> A system snapshot for a personal computer is potentially a really difficult thing to restore (ex. you break the device and need a new one, unless it matches exactly restoring snapshot likely puts you in OS recovery mode). While I am sure the process has limitations, I think that modern Windows has some amount of flexibility there, because due to a defect I've recently had to swap out my mainboard + CPU, and the system booted up just fine. The most major issue was that with the default drivers Windows had reverted to, the Ethernet controller didn't work, which could have been a little bit of a Catch-22 (no internet without the correct drivers, and no correct drivers without internet), but in practice I just downloaded the drivers on a different device and transferred them over via USB.

bretpiatt 4y ago
Yeah, plug and play drivers are much better today than years ago, they're also still challenging in many situations. For someone with your technical skill level it's very manageable, most folks don't know what a mainboard is. To an average user it's much easier to work with restoring their My Documents (and if they need full system state have Parallels save VMs under that folder path).