@RazorKat83 Very sorry for your loss.
I have been using Macrium for many years for myself and others. I've probably made upward to a thousand images and successfully restored a good number of them. We all approach imaging differently so no one's "way" of doing things is wrong, just not the way the next guy does it. I believe in keeping it as simple as possible. If it's made too difficult or costly, a user will tend to not do it.
ANY backup plan is better than none. A backup plan can be as simple or as complex as one makes it be
. You will have to take everyone's suggestions and decide for yourself and your own situation what is right for you. So here's a few thoughts from me.
Do I do a test restore of
every image I make? No I do not. But I do test that I can boot from every Macrium rescue usb drive I create. I always keep several images to fall back on in case any image will not restore. I do usually mount every image I make in explorer to make sure at the very least my personal files could be read and restored manually even if the entire image could not be restored.
Macrium has failed me
once and it was from an image I had copied. Therefore, I never copy images anymore.
What do I image and how often do I do it? For me personally, I image the entire OS drive at least once a month; more often if I make a lot of changes in my OS. For me, my OS is more important than my personal data which is stored on a separate drive which I image every 2-3 months. While its data does change, it's not an excessive amount and nothing I can't afford to lose if push comes to shove. For most people, it's just the opposite. Personal data trumps the OS in importance.
So, how often a user chooses to image and what he chooses to image is subjective to his own drive configuration and needs. Even if you have only one drive you may have chosen to create a separate partition for user data. Maybe you sync your user folders to Onedrive.
We have a lot of folks who don't back up their system drives as often as their data drives and others who are just the opposite because each uses his computer differently. THERE IS NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL. If there is a doubt, image everything.
Where do I store my images? On any
other drive of any kind, but NEVER on the same drive I am creating the image from. Yes we're all spoiled by how fast it is to use an nvme or ssd to store our images, but using old mechanical drives work just fine if that's all you have or a large flash drive if that's all you can afford.
