Quote from rc5781:
do you restore from a "secure zone" or do you save the back up on a completely different hard drive?
I don't use secure zone. One reason is that if the drive dies, your secure zone can't be accessed.
I make images to an external hard drive.
I once had an external hard drive go bad.. not the drive itself, but the box's electronics.
I got an external drive enclosure and was able to mount the drive in it and all was OK.
But I got to thinking... if the drive had gone bad, I'd have lost all of my backup images. That's not really crucial, because you can just get another drive and make new images of the current setup. However, older images would be lost.
As for older images, I start with a "base" image... WinXP, many setup changes and a few registry tweaks, MS Office, MetaStock, and a few other programs I plan to always have.
So as to reduce the chance of losing base images, I've taken to making an additional copy of them onto a second drive. I'm using 32G flash drive, but one could also use an additional hard drive.
When it comes to backups, you always hope you have enough of them. One is better than none. Two, better still. I've had situations where I THOUGHT my backups were OK only to find out there was an unknown problem with some of them... hence now having more than one backup.