[abbbi]

it depends. Doing a complete disaster recovery of a windows system IMHO can be a real struggle. Especially if you have to restore a system to different hardware, which the system state backup that microsoft offers does not support afaik.

Backing up a linux system in combination with REAR:

https://github.com/rear/rear

and a backup utility of your choice for the regular backup has never failed me so far. I used it to restore linux systems to complete different hardware without any troubles.

[magicalhippo]

For my cases it's been quite easy, but then I've mostly had quite plain hardware so didn't need vendor drivers to recover.

While I've had to recover in anger twice, I've used the same procedure to migrate to new hardware many times. Just restore to the new disk in the new machine, and let Windows reboot a few times and off I went.

REAR looks useful, hadn't seen that before.