That is " Not every one is a master mind". My topic was started for those that are not that talented to write TB's of data each day
You don't have to write it. Consider photos. Many people will plug their camera in, and the transfer wizard will copy them to the local disk, and delete them from the camera. Depending on how an image is made, restoring an image could easily wipe those files, which would be impossible to recover; or, again, depending on their storage location, they could not even be part of the image, meaning they aren't "backed up" at all. (which raises the point that disk imaging is not a replacement for backups anyway).
This is for people who need just a couple of clicks and 20 minutes to get them back to reading emails from their great grand kids or looking up a favorite recipe or maybe just playing a game.
And what about the photos of those grandkids? Most Camera software defaults to the user profile folder, which upon restoring a disk image will be paved over with whatever is in the image, destroying anything that was there. (the default for the camera wizard also deletes the photos from the camera, making the copy on the hard drive the only one)
I don't do that much installing and uninstalling that would require a fresh install
Installing and uninstalling applications or changing various settings has a cumulative effect. Using a PNG, GIF, or JPEG background in Windows XP can introduce a whole host of problems that most people wouldn't have the first clue about, for example. Badly written installers might replace shared files, causing odd errors to show up during startup or when launching applications. "Windows Rot" is what it is commonly referred to, although it has nothing to do with windows and everything to do with the thousands of otherwise unassuming changes various applications might make as they are used, installed, and configured. Death by a thousand cuts. The time it takes the Right-Click menu to show for most items is a good indicator of how bad it is. It should be pretty much instant. For me it can sometimes take a second; on some of my older PCs before reformatting I've had it take minutes or literally han fact install hooks and libraries in that fashion, and may or may not properly remove them when the application is uninstalled (and using a tool like CCleaner could in fact make things worse). This is particularly the case since most pre-fabricated machines already come in pretty bad shape, with about a thousand useless applications installed. (My laptop was practically garbage when I bought it until I did a clean install, for example)
PS I think your reasoning is in the minority of most PC users.
The "minority" of PC users is the people that don't have irreplacable data that they created. Not the other way around. It doesn't have to be Program source code, obviously. Most people have various Documents, slideshows, presentations, Photos, or even game high-scores that represent a significant time investment which would need to be duplicated of those files were lost. In the case of photos, particularly, you simply cannot re-take them; if you lose the only copy of a digital photograph, it's gone. If the disk image in fact stores those as well, than what happens if they change or revise a document, presentation, or other file in the meantime? when the image is restored it will mercilessly pave over everything on the drive with whatever the image has. This can be mitigated by partitioning, but knowing how to partition is again outside the so-called "majority" of users that merely use it for E-mail and basic browsing. In fact, people using their systems for E-mail and basic browsing are at the lowest risk of developing a problem that restoring a disk image could fix that could be fixed via other means, primarily System Restore, which is designed for the very purposes you cite for Disk Imaging (Which is the only way you can back-up an OS)
W7 has a nagger that keeps reminding you that you have not created a back up.
It's talking about backing up your data. Not Operating System Files. You can't restore those properly using anything but a disk image, which of course images the entire disk/partition, not just the OS.
Disk Imaging is not a total backup solution. If somebody has the ability to backup and restore disk images they are already outside the alleged Majority of users anyway. If somebody doesn't have any personal data on their machines, if their system is basically only the OS and preferences, than yes, a OS Disk image might see usage... But where are they going to put it? Additionally, if they only use their system for E-mail and checking the weather, how will they get in a situation where they need to restore a Disk Image, as opposed to being able to resolve the problem with System Restore?
Which brings me to my point- for the set of users you are prescribing this for, what does Imaging their drives get them that System Restore doesn't provide, aside from additional complications and an ironically higher chance of data loss as restoring the image means paving over anything in the "My Documents" folder which is the default location for all applications to save data to. I can already see a likely scenario, somebody following a strict backup regimen that images their C drive to an external automatically, or something; one day, they realize they need to see their tax files from last year, or have to refer to some other document they saved. The document isn't there, though, because a month or two ago they restored a month old-backup image in an attempt to fix the weird lines they had on their monitor sometimes when they played bejeweled. Of course that didn't fix the problem because those "weird lines" are in fact a fault with the video driver, but restoring the image wiped over every single user-document that was newer than 3 months. As far as they can tell, files simply dissappear randomly. This only prompts them to back up more often, but doesn't address the fact that what they are doing is not backing up their own user data but rather backing up their system drive so they can get up and running quickly, in the event that their OS is corrupted or something.
My Point isn't so much that imaging the system drive is completely useless, but rather that it should be regarded as less important than backing up your own data. Those Photos that were sent in E-mail attachments of their grandkids, or that scan of that picture they drew in kindergarten or that camcorder video of their graduation, etc. Those are not valueless and you are basically defaulting on "user data isn't important" which is more likely to cause people to lose valuable data. Those photos, image scans, videos, etc are what should be backed up. Not the Operating System. Any Prefabricated machine comes with a Recovery Disk that performs that same purpose.
