I also make sure to create an image of my system partitions with Acronis True Image every Monday just in case.
hmm never thought of using acronis on a more regular basis myself such as weekly. I kinda left that up to restore points and if a restore point is unavailable then refer to image as last hope before a manual rebuild of it all. With my data stored not on the system hard drive it allows me to rebuild without wiping out my data and that data on the data drive is also backed up to a group of 3 x 32GB USB sticks labelled A, B, C and I backup daily to them in a rotation. So I can go back up to 3 days if needed. I also for most important data back it up to a 3TB external HDD, but only connect that after running through the motions of a full system scan with latest definitions and then when I know the system is clean, connect the 3TB drive and back up data.
(*Note: I do this full scan before connection the 3TB drive out of what happened in the mid 1990s to me when I got bit by a virus that came bundled with free dos games I was downloading that spread like fire to all media attached to the system. Each floppy disk I mounted in the system was instantly infected. I didnt know I had a virus, but when reading disks and performing a DIR command it would report false capacity of disks and random ascii. I thought it was a dirty floppy drive, so I swapped the drive. That didnt change anything so I decided to wipe my system and reinstall the OS, well everything was ok until I went to add my data back to the build and reintroduced the infected disks and then the system was infected again and I finally suspected it must be a virus. I then got Norton and ran that and sure enough i had a virus and it cleaned it but all data on the disks was ruined. I threw away a pile of floppies that I knew were infected and scanned a bunch of others that I wanted to attempt to save, but it hit my data pretty hard. So since then I get nervous when connecting an external with my backups as to make sure I am not going to ruin all my data. BUT I also run an antivirus these days whereas in years past, I didnt because computers were weaker and Norton for example showed a definite performance impact with its realtime scanner service on a Pentium II and III system back in the day.) Its nice that modern multiple core systems are powerful enough to juggle a realtime scanner without impacting performance. I have a friend who is into optimization and he swears by not running an AV because he wants maximum performance. He also goes in and disables default services not needed etc to optimize. I dont need my system to be 1% faster etc, so I just run standard build. If I need more performance I might overclock or CPU, GPU, RAM, or SSD upgrade instead
