limits to imaging.

hi,
Is there in theory a limit to how many images you can restore on one computer.
Can it be harmful to image too many times.?
Thank you.

 

Thank you kindly peter.

 

some of my machines are restored 1 time per week.

it tooks around 6-7 minutes (not fast, not slow).

 

It's bad to restore often, only if you are restoring an SSD (you 're sucking away its life faster). But in the past month i 've done that too.

 

That's the way I understand it, too, but I don't really care; I usually restore an image a couple times a month and I've been using an SSD for over a few years now. One thing that apparently helps preserve their life is to refrain from defragging them.

 

the only limit being the state of the medium (hard drive) holding/restoring the image

 

Thanks for the input.
Im not using a SSD.Only restored about a dozen times .

 

I did worse. Between December and now, i must have restored more than 20 times (don't ask). But it's still new, so i try to excuse myself.

Avoiding defragging, is the same story. Defragging, writes on the SSD. And writing kills the SSD faster (the flash modules on SSD have a certain max write cycle/erase number). Defragging hurts , because a) the benefits are minimal, as it doesn't read the same way as mechanical disks and b) it writes on the SSD ignoring TRIM.

Also the more free space your SSD has, the more it will live. Because the built-in controller, tries to write evenly on all NAND modules, as to reduce wear. A defragger, by trying to accumulate data always at the same place, writes always on the same modules, wearing them down unevenly and thus prematurely.

You can download SSD Life Free (bottom of the page) from here and it will tell you how much you 've already written on your SSD (and thus pushing it to its grave).Also gives a prediction on when your SSD will die, but it's guesstimate, not really accurate.

http://ssd-life.com/eng/download-ssdlife.html

Mine is for the time being predicted to ascend to hardware heaven in 2022. But it's because it's still new i guess, so all SMART attributes are "healthy" and maybe i 've fooled it too with the many restores. Not sure 100% how it works on that.

http://ssd-life.com/eng/how.html

Also gives a prediction on when your SSD will die, but it's guesstimate, not really accurate.

 

Ah, that's nothing. Also once i had read an article-test, according to which, on mechanical drives, a regular high usage is healthier than rarely putting it under strain. So by restoring you may be even giving a "massage" on your HDD.

 

Thanks for the info!

 

Well, on occasion (every year or so) I do full read scans/tests on on some of my older drives. And guess what? They are 20+ years old!

 

What size were they 20+ years ago? 20-40MB? You still keep/use those?

 

No. I don't really know (or care) what's on them. It's more a long term experiment of how well do disks retain their data without refreshing. My oldest disk is from around 1980, that puts it about 33 years old.

Every year or two, when I got nothing better to do, I'll go into the basement and pull out the box. I'll connect them up and run checksums on the zip and rar archives. If it passes that means the data is good. If a single bit is out of place, it will fail. Then I put them back.

The smallest is a 5MB Corvus disk and a Sider 10MB disk. These are for the Apple II - so I must transfer the data to a PC to do my tests. But I like classic computing anyways, so it's a hobby. The other ones are various retired disks (from upgrades) me and my buddies conducted, ranging from 212 MB through 1TB more or less.

 

There is no telling how many times I have restored
I do this in the process of modding the OS,
trying things out and if it does not work to suite me
then a restore and try again
I only limit would be if you wore out your hard drive
I have never had this happen
so I think it is safe to say there are "No Limits"