From the article I linked:
"However, in actual application scenarios, hot database backup is usually needed more by IT administrators."
Emphasis in bold is mine. Immediately I should add that, to an actual Windows application, the Windows registry is a database, and, the filesystem also is a database.
For home users, cold backups are the only real way to make sure that reliability can also be defined, as the lack of a reliable, robust verification method when using Macrium Reflect Free or similar software running on Windows to make a hot image already implies that reliability can
not be defined, adequately, within reason, as now you literally are depending on a whole lot of (multi-factorially complex) guesswork in that department, particularly, anyway to begin with. What reliability have you got left, when you can't put a finger on it besides making claims from the likes of "your house and that of all the people you know never caught on fire,
therefore these houses must all meet the (reliable) definition of a reliable place to live in"? Carl Sagan's famous book titled
"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" explains this type of flawed reasoning really well.
I never said that the average end user dealing with a home system needs to understand this specific differentiation. What I tried to point out
instead was that he/she shouldn't need to depend on the kind of reliability that exists primarily within a lot of people's colorful imaginations. The relevancy here comes from the fact that this discussion is about using software to create the kind of
images that can be stored as persistently reliable backups, not about encouraging him/her and other people like him/her to use it for the goal of sustaining persistent
imaginations. The bottom line is, it usually takes IT administrator skills to be able to, consistently, deal with inconsistent data gained from snapshot creation, the inconsistencies in which are a result of pending operation tasks that belong to various applications and backround processes still actively running on the system whilst making a hot backup (i.e., as opposed to making a cold one). Applications might be able to fully recover from these inconsistencies or they might not be. It quite simply depends on things like what exactly are the applications you use, and how you use them.
In short, for the average home user, shutting down Windows before booting from a USB flash drive to make a cold image should neither be that especially hard nor be so terribly inconvenient, that he/she should need to face the added risks inherent of making a hot image. This isn't to say that hot images are necessarily always completely useless to the average home user. Making cold images does not prevent the user from still being able to make an occasional hot image. But for the average home user to mainly depend on hot images calling them "reliable backups" and to then keep using that as a pretext for not needing to make cold images? I mean, let me please apologize in advance for my doing this on purpose, but... here's what I believe qualifies as probably the best way to describe the essence of that:
