Resolved Can External HD Be Safeguard Against Malware?

Crunchie recently guided me through cleaning malware off a friend's machine. As we went through this process, a thought occurred to me.

I have an external hard drive that is only connected every couple of days to back up data files and once a week to image the hard drive. If one discovers possible malware on their computer, would it be possible/reasonable to format/clean the hard drive and restore the image from the previous session? Of course you would lose changes/updates made in the interim.

I am assuming that the image on the external drive would be clean - unless the malware had a time delay fuse or something. If the external HD is connected and on whenever the computer is on to permit automatic imaging and backup, I would assume that it would not be any safer from the malware than the computer itself.

 

Go it in one Virginia,

Chances are by the time you spot malware it's been active for a while.

 

Wildfire,

I suspected that was probably the case but I thought I would ask the question anyway. Thanks.

Just remembered I forgot to ask you what "Go it in one..." means. I Googled the phrase and one of the hits was Explorz.com which appears to be primarily frequented by Australians.

 

Typo (my laptop's keypad is dodgy),

Got it in one, Hit the nail on the head etc