On Sun, 26 Aug 2001 18:43:55 -0700 Simon Michael <simon at joyful.com> wrote:
>Fellow newbies, the lesson here is to be prepared and willing to
>abandon your image and start from a fresh one as needed.  Make sure to
>save any important work as changesets of course. To save time, keep a
>clean up-to-date starter image around. (*)
>
>-Simon
>
>(*) better advice from the more experienced always welcome

Simon,

That's actually pretty good advice. The issue of how to protect the user from disastrous changes while at the same time allowing the user to change anything he/she wants has been a subject of discussion at irregular intervals for quite some time. Unfortunately, no really good solutions have yet emerged and I suspect it will be a tough one to get right. Until that happens, having good backups is an important tool. To your list (having a clean backup image and filing out change sets), I would also add saving the image under another name before embarking on potentially perilous journeys. Given the size of external storage these days, replicating your image and changes file is an inexpensive bit of protection.

Cheers,
Bob