At this moment a Windows 7 VM I have on my laptop is being copied to my home storage server. It's finally at a state where I can archive it in case of disaster. It works in VirtualBox just fine, my apps work, and it all runs stable. I've applied the license key, now to put a copy of this VM into the vault in case of sudden laptop death or some other calamity; the days of reusable license keys are now behind us so these precautions need to be taken.
All I can say right now is that I'm very glad I have wired networking in my house. If this 14GB copy had to happen over wifi I'd be up a lot longer than I am now. The copy is currently throttling on I/O waits on the receiving server (gotta get that thing upgraded, like soon. 8 yo hardware really is too slow) rather than pure network. I know from experience that I can expect between 2-3 MB/s transfer rate on the wireless side (no N yet, gotta change that too). Right now this transfer is averaging about 7 MB/s to an NFS export.
Wireless is good enough for most things, but when you need something streamed fast wired is better.
All I can say right now is that I'm very glad I have wired networking in my house. If this 14GB copy had to happen over wifi I'd be up a lot longer than I am now. The copy is currently throttling on I/O waits on the receiving server (gotta get that thing upgraded, like soon. 8 yo hardware really is too slow) rather than pure network. I know from experience that I can expect between 2-3 MB/s transfer rate on the wireless side (no N yet, gotta change that too). Right now this transfer is averaging about 7 MB/s to an NFS export.
Wireless is good enough for most things, but when you need something streamed fast wired is better.
Wireless is nice to have, but when you need to move lots of data I'm glad I have gigabit ethernet home as well, and that happens pretty often, actually.
I do not keep any images of windows installs 'just in case' the pc/laptop goes south. I have an unattended installation routine (both for the os and the apps) so I just have the pc boot from pxe and come back in 2 to 3 hours when it's ready. Keeping images means that you will forget to add something to the image or the hardware will change and it will no longer work properly with the image you have, plus you still will have to apply a lot of updates when you use it, so why just not reload the OS and start fresh.