>Wise words. Thanks.

Now that I think about it, some other advice would be to keep your "imaged" stuff (OS and a few essential apps) on a seperate partition from your data. Why? Because the imaging software I use wipes the drive before laying down the good bits (as I would imagine any good imaging software would do), thereby wiping out any data you might have, meaning you need to add a restore to the process. So, keep the data seperate, but still backed up, and you should still be back to work quickly, because reimaging also restores the registry and any other pointers to where your data may lie.

Also, imaging your data adds to the size of the image. Not only is this an issue for disk space (though 25 gig drives are under US$200), but it takes more time to restore the image. IMO, the goal is to get back to work as quickly as possible, and not to restore data.

Don't use it as a backup, use it to get your system back up in the least amount of time. Imaging, IMO, is for when your system is trashed via bad DLLs or whatever, but not hardware failure (though it works for that, too, if the image is on a seperate physical drive). Data backups are for when you trash your data, or lose data due to a drive crash or other hardware failure.

>Must have been Red Hat 6.2 <s>

Oh, how I wish I could blame this one on a non-MS beta (it may even still be alpha) OS. :-)