Good cloning Vs. System Restore

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Rather than System Restore, I have had a fabulous experience for the last
two or three years with this stand alone, inexpensive, drive cloner. You
have to remove your drive from your machine, which is pretty simple on my
Lenovo Thinkpad, and you have to clone it on to a drive that's at least
as big, but after you clone it, you have a byte for byte duplicate of
your working drive, that you can put into your machine and boot from as
if nothing had happened.


http://www.amazon.com/Aluratek-External-Portable-Duplicator-AHDDUB100/dp/B002FJJMAI/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449204418&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=aluratek+drive+cloner; eudora="autourl">
http://www.amazon.com/Aluratek-External-Portable-Duplicator-AHDDUB100/dp/B002FJJMAI/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449204418&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=aluratek+drive+cloner



My policy is to have two cloned drives, which I alternate between,
cloning my "real" drive every week or two. If you do have to
get back to your operating system of a week or two ago, you can and then
you need only update your data files for what's happened in the
intervening period.


--Harry


Seeing as various updates have
trashed several systems of mine or that I maintain, on more than a few
occasions, I'd have to say that Auto Update is a big risk one should
_not_ take.  And I have plenty of company, from what I read
online.  (This is on 7, both x86 and x64 varieties, but it was an
occasional problem on XP as well.)  I wait at least a few weeks
after an update is released, check the internet for reports, put short
descriptive info with any warnings into a  file for reference, and
only then selectively "audition" the new updates in small
batches at a time.  Woody's column at InfoWorld -- among others --
has verified a number of serious problems, and a couple times saved me
from unknowingly stepping off a cliff.  If / when things have really
gone South, I can have a non-functional computer, where practically
nothing works, or it goes into endless reboot loops, or other fun
stuff.  It *may be recoverable* from a Restore Point, if I can even
reach one, or from going into Safe Mode to rip an update out by the roots
. . .  or not.  The Win Recovery Console is a bad joke, in my
experience.  I never got familiar with the so-called "Repair
Install" procedure over the existing OS.  A few times I've had
to resort to wiping a drive and putting back an Acronis boot partition
image that was not nearly as recent as I would have liked, then building
it back to where it was when the system got nuked.  (A full
reinstall from scratch would be completely unacceptable and unthinkable
to me.)  My time is too valuable to have to pour a lot of it into
this crap !  So, NO, I'm going to minimize their chances of doing
this again.




   Jordan






From: Kari Eveli



To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx


Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:16 AM


Subject: Re: Windows 10 is creeping into your system, it is time
to make a decision!




John,



That works, but you would be better off installing GWX Control Panel
and


enabling auto updates. After all, you do not want to miss important



security updates.



Best regards,



Kari Eveli


LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)


lexitec@xxxxxxxx



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29.11.2015, 3:15, John Paines (Redacted sender vf200 for DMARC)
wrote:






> BTW, I believe you can prevent the stealth downloads of Win10 by



> disabling automatic update.  Run update manually once a
month and


> select only crucial updates.  I have two systems, 7 and
8.1, and


> neither has been prompting an "upgrade", with auto
update disabled on


> both.