I remember one time long ago when a huge company spent many thousands of dollars training their people to use Windows 3.1 & Microsoft Office, as they switched over from running mainframes & terminals. Folks in the office I dealt with were scared to death, & as expected, all that training had zero impact at that point. I introduced them to a simple PC game. They had quite a bit of fun, & then came to realize that they weren't scared of these new PCs anymore -- they could now think back to that training, & put it to use.
I think that when Chris encourages practice on stuff that doesn't matter, part of it's learning, & part of it's learning not to be afraid of something you're not experienced at, yet. Lots of people expect anything with electronics, & especially PCs & such to be complicated. My mom was that way with a PC or Android tablet, yet put her at a mainframe terminal with more complicated procedures & she was fine -- she'd learned that she couldn't crash the mainframe at the library where she volunteered, but was scared she'd ruin her laptop.
Some weeks ago I would have considered that back up protocol overkill.
I'm no expert by any means, but the discipline of risk mgmt. applies pretty well IMHO to anything tech. Anything electrical &/or electronic can fail, with or without warning, so weigh the risk to you should whatever device or component fail, & figure out the expected total cost of such a failure. Then if/when possible estimate the odds of a failure, figure out the costs of different methods of mitigating the total cost of a failure, and then weigh the costs of a failure vs. the costs to make that failure less painful. It can sound complicated, but with a bit of forethought anyone I think can use the basic principles.
Take anything digital that can be stored on a hard drive, USB stick, optical disc etc... How bad off would you be if it disappeared? If you have a simple Windows 10 install with one or two games you always play, & nothing else in the way of software, if you lost that Windows install you might be able to reinstall win10 & your game(s) in an hour. If that was the case, spending 1/2 an hour to back up that Windows partition once would be the break even point -- 1/2 hour to backup + 1/2 an hour to restore = the hour it would take to install fresh.
But that's Windows 10, with relatively few updates because it's new, and in idealized circumstances where you can perform an installation in less than an hour. It might take you more than a day to reinstall everything, & you might have lots of stuff like apps that were on GOTD, that may not be easily [or cheaply] replaced. The total costs of losing that Windows install would be a lot higher, so going to greater lengths to protect it, i.e. frequent backups, are likely justified.
Or you might have circumstances that are somewhere in between... Let's say you have a installed copy Windows 7 with a couple of games & not much if any other software. Reinstalling Windows would take longer than my example using WIndows 10, & then you'd have to deal with all the updates, which could take Much longer still. Both options I've mentioned, reinstalling Windows & frequent backing ups, may have a fairly high cost comparred to a 3rd alternative, which would be to learn how to create & maintain an up to date Windows 7 image [.wim file].
That brings up two things -- 1) always look for easier, cheaper alternatives, & 2) remember to include the odds. When it comes to that 2nd point, backing up Windows takes a set amount of time & doesn't require much hands-on, but learning how to set up that image, & then setting it up, is going to take a larger initial investment, with the payout of less time & effort as time goes on. Will that larger, front-loaded investment be worth it? If you're using an older PC or laptop that you expect to fail, & if you expect to replace it with a Windows 10 PC or laptop when it does fail, then no. A 3rd point to consider is if you can dual purpose your investment -- a Windows backup is only good for that device, but an image could be used over a variety of hardware, so if you have several PCs &/or laptops to manage, score another couple of points to maintaining an image rather than backing up.
You can use the same sort of planning with hardware itself. I had a hard drive unexpectedly fail last week -- one I used for storage rather than Windows. I found a decent price on 1 brand/model at Amazon, & bought 2. The main drive in my wife's PC was getting old, so the odds were increasing that it would start to fail, and by buying two I saved myself the time it would take to find a deal on a hard drive a 2nd time. I had a smaller hard drive in her PC where I stored local copies of backups, and I put her old drive in its place, installing the new drive after cloning it -- if the new drive soon fails, & ~15% [or more] do, I just change the setting in the Bios & she's back like it was until I can get a replacement. Once it looks like the new drive's OK, I'll use the old one to store backups locally -- since I keep a copy of the backups on an external drive, if that old drive [or the external drive] should fail, not a huge deal. The smaller drive I pulled out? Once everything seems OK I'll use it externally.
The drive that failed BTW had great S.M.A.R.T. data, still showing it was in excellent shape after it failed. While S.M.A.R.T. data is useful sometimes, I go primarily by the age of the drive, which is why I used that drive for storage rather than Windows in the 1st place. I could have reduced risk by pulling the drive when I stopped using it for Windows, but I got more of my investment back by continuing to use it, just not with anything really critical.
Another example, I have a small TV at my desk that's set up so that I can use it as a monitor in a pinch -- using it along with a USB keyboard & mouse my tablet can work as a desktop PC in a pinch as well. That came in handy when over the weekend a new POS dell monitor I'd used for 2 weeks failed. [The Only good thing I can say about dell, is that since the founder took it private, know just exactly whom to curse. ;) ] Using that little TV wasn't an ideal experience, but it worked well enough, & let me among other things do comparison shopping for the Asus monitor I picked up locally last night. I could have bought or kept an old monitor as a spare, but the hassle of using the TV was less than the hassle of storing another monitor.
Maybe just look at it like everything has a cost, including your time, & everything has some risk, with its own costs if the roll of the dice goes against you. Put into that perspective, you try to plan so you spend the least possible.
