On 20 Sep 23  18:51:27, Arelor said the following to Nick Andre:

A> Truth to be told, if an 8 years old node gets toasted, chances are you are
A> taking advantage of the fact it kicked the bucket to install something moder
A> on a new machine.

Yes and no. I know where you're coming from but my needs are different.

In the case of my BBS machine, its a major Fido mail hub, responsible for 
catering to the emotional-needs of over a hundred Sysops who connect here 
several times a day. I see its limitations and know what works, what doesn't.
It will not run to my satisfaction on anything beyond XP. But it does have a
new home on Vmware to eliminate the legacy hardware aspect. It was running
on an IBM R50 for.....  15 years? It was time to go modern as you say. It can 
live out the rest of its life on XP but on much more reliable server hardware.

The other systems here at home are newer; a DC on 2012R2 and Exchange 2016,
terminal services on 2022 and these are systems which are not easy to rebuild
from scratch. You don't just rebuild a DC and all the user accounts or
rebuild Exchange from scratch in a day.

Maybe some others enjoy camping out infront of their computers all weekend 
doing that sort of mundane work but I don't... computers in my household work
for me, not the other way around. I already work IT for 40~50 hours a week.
Its also why I'm not really a Linux fan, theres always "something" Linux
guys have to do with their system. My tinkering days are over; family first.

My personal laptop I do everything on is Windows 11 with a mountain of apps
configured to my satisfaction... registry tweaks and having things exactly the
way that I like it. There's just no way I'm ever reinstalling the OS and all
the apps I use. Not practical and some apps cannot be reactivated anymore.

So in my case image-backups solved all of these problems and can be restored
to different hardware if necessary. If my apartment gets ripped off, burned
down, laptop destroyed, whatever, I'm back in business relatively painless.

Its interesting convo that backups are really different for everyone which 
is why I said there are many good solutions discussed here.

Nick

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (618:500/24)