The question at thembid.com’s blog was ‘What are your essentials?’ after a windows re-format, however I want to touch on the actual process and how that can me made easier.
House keeping is one of those tasks I used to love to hate a few years ago but an unfortunate necessity with a Microsoft Windows based machine.
Back then backing up wasn’t an easy task, reinstalling everything took almost a day to get up and running and there was always something that was forgotten or missing or just not quite right.
Over the years I have practiced and perfected my technique and with the software available at the moment it is even easier.
What I have -
- NAS (network attached storage) or USB/ Firewire drive
- Disk imaging software such as Norton Ghost
- VPC (Virtual PC) software such as VMWare
I now have basic ‘build’ for each machine I have whether it be my laptop, desktop or development machine as they all have things slightly different. I also make use of VPC‘s for my development machines to make things even easier.
