E-mail contacts etc lost forever?

[Swa]

I hear you, but also disagree, all your settings and data custom to you are saved in one location. So if you backup that 1 folder you have everything, from cached entries, to user docs.

%USERPROFILE%
Typically c:\users\profile

The problem with that is that it's a part of the OS. You have to sift through multiple locations to get the data and they don't make it easy as well by having multiple links to the same places. It's a lot easier when applications and data are separate from the OS. I have always used separate partitions for my programs so it's just a matter of installing them over themselves. Now I have to look through a windows folder to find the data for each program that doesn't work that way.

 

[SauRoNZA]

MS could definitely improve things when it comes to backups. OS X can restore a system completely on a new PC using Time Machine. Personally I enjoy starting from scratch every few years. The system is cleaner and faster, and I just restore the apps I use frequently. Even then, my documents are on OneDrive, so that will download itself automatically once you've configured your MS account. And I've used Simfy for music for nearly two years now, so nothing to backup there. Evernote stores my notes in the cloud too.

Until February of this year I was running the exact same user profile on OSX that I had setup back in 2005 and OSX 10.2 or 10.3.

It had migrated with me over two jobs and multiple machines from a PowerBook G4 to an iMac to Macbook to a Macbook Retina a probably a few in between I can't remember and multiple OS Revisions all the way to 10.10.

Never needed a format or a reinstall of any kind and always ran as smooth and fast as the first time.

I cannot say the same for any Windows installation ever.