Hate to say it but Windows 7 sucks in my experience

Originally Posted by NaiyaShamiso

I don't back up my OS, seems to be a waste of space to me. I rather back up all my data and games with the little 2TB backup drive that I have.

That may work for you. But as a general rule it is not viable. If you have no images, the option in case of a major problem is a reinstall of the system, all updates since the dawn of time, all programs (appr. 50 in my case) all settings have to be redone, etc. Last time I did that, it took 3 days elapsed - mainly because the downloads take forever. E.g. WAIK alone takes over 1 hour (1.7GBs). Similar with big updates like SPs for the system and Office.

I use Acronis to make images a recovery takes less than 15 min. I have the HD partitioned with system and programs on one and data on the second. I only image the system and backup data separately on mutiple HDs.
Joe

Oh no, don't get me wrong, I see why you would do it. I just don't thats all. I guess partly cause I enjoy installing the OS and software. If I invested in a licence for Ghost, I would most likely do it though. I might do that thinking about it now. Though I would do a full reinstall and then do the restore from there. Not to mention I would want to get my servers back up and running again as well.

No need to wait for Ghost (which I used for 3 years). Free Macrium is a lot better. I made a tutorial which can get you started. I like full images because they are easy to manage. But if you prefer differentials, use free Paragon. That is a good imaging program too, but a bit more difficult to use than macrium.

And if one does want to make an 'image back-up' , certainly Windows 7 can to that quite nicely, all by itself, w/out any 3rd party added software.

Drew

whs, will either of those work over the network?

I backup daily using automatically using W7 generic to a different internal other than the OS Drive, I also backup weekly on Wednesdays using Macrium Reflect Pro to a completely different drive than the on I use on daily basis. I keep 3 weeks worth of backups on each drive. Gotta love redundancy . I have 4 internal drives

Originally Posted by Drew

And if one does want to make an 'image back-up' , certainly Windows 7 can to that quite nicely, all by itself, w/out any 3rd party added software.

Drew

It can, but 50% of the time you cannot recover. Believe me. I have fixed a dozen of those cases.

Originally Posted by NaiyaShamiso

whs, will either of those work over the network?

The pro versions do. But you do not want to image over the network. You are talking 10GB to 40GBs of data depending on the amount of data on the partition. That would take hours.

My system wouldn't change that much after the original backup.