its a trojan... spend all day to get ride off .. or reformat in like 1hour...

Nooooooooo, if you do that, the bad guys have won.
Takes me a day to get my system back to normal if I reformat, can normal fix trojans and viruses in a couple of hours, normally minutes.

agree with poundsey here, although i aint had a little hiccup in my pc running, usually just a BIG FUCK UP which leaves me with no other option other than a full reformat. But, time wise it might only 2 hours to re-format, then another 12 hours to bring all yer stuff back upto date, unless ya back everything up weekly, which is gunna take ya loads of time anyways. answer is NO EASY FIX, just work out wots best for you. My current position is my PC = FULL atm, so gunna back up all my necesarry stuff and when i got time gunna reformat it, but ya gotta work out wots best, if ya got a fuckton of work, and loads of stuff installed, probs best ya just spend a day removing trojan lol

aint ya heard of back ups of hd? lol... reformat an back up to speen couple hours..

aint ya heard of back ups of hd? lol... reformat an back up to speen couple hours..



+1 wtf :)

ya got another HDD to back up to ? or partition yer HDD ? back up HDD is summat i have always overlooked lol

My data is backed up and held separately but to be honest I don't see the point of backing up the OS, so many bloody patches installed every couple of weeks I can't be arsed to back it up that often and whenever I install something new.

Much better idea is to stop yourself getting done over in the first place, get some decent malware prevention, keep it up to date and use at least two other products to run on demand scans, as no single piece of software can keep you safe.

Oh, and avoid left handed websites...

By the way, how many backups do you guys keep? And what do you use to backup? There are 'backups' and then there are backups.

you would be suprised how many people come to me to fix computers saying they never visit left handed sites. 90% of the time they dont even clear the history.
i use 2 drives on my pc, 1 for windows and my docs. the other is just for steam ( now 339Gb )
i also use 2 external drives, 1 is 250Gb and 2 is 300Gb all docs, music, vids photos etc backed up to both of these. i need to get a 500Gb to back up my steamapps folder tho.
i recently got a couple of unused sky HD boxes, they have 300Gb sata drives in them, take them out and give them a quick format.

Only in the past 6 months have I actually had an antivirus program, don't really need it in anycase, just finally got one out of precaution.
I only do backups of important work/school files and such. I don't find it necessary to keep backups of software etc. Definitely not backing up my OS (pirated windows 7, no windows updates installed )
I have a few 1 TB external HDD's just laying around incase.

During all the years I have had computers (since early 2000's), I have never gotten a virus/trojan etc. Hooray for me

lol, the left handed websites comment was only a joke. I've always been meticulous about patching Windows but last year I got hit by a Java exploit because I hadn't bothered updating Java. I think I was around 6 months out of date but a site I went to (fpsbanana from memory) had a poisoned advertising banner that opened a new window and hammered my machine via Java.
I was sooo pissed off but was able to fix it quite quickly thanks to many years of experience and a fantastic piece of software called Combofix.

I was asking what people do about backups because if you get a piece of code on your system that lays dormant for a few days, you may just end up restoring an infected backup. Personally I think if you are going to backup the OS you need to be able to roll back by a month (at least) and backup every couple of days (if not every day), it needs to be done with external storage too, as internal is vulnerable to infection. CBA with that! Also, don't rely on System Restore in Windows because a lot of malware now targets the restore points as well.