Issues

• Limited availability
  The 'backup your entire computer' (drive image) option is only available on premium versions of Vista. Since I don't consider anything less than a full drive backup a "real" backup, Vista Home users need another solution anyway.

• No compression
  Believe me, with the size of Vista image backups, you want compression! Of course, I didn't do tests of the same drive type and free space on XP vs. Vista machines, but my rough guesstimate is that Vista drive image backups of drives containing the operating system are 8 times larger than similar XP versions.

• No differential backups
  Again, Vista backups take up a lot of space, so you really want to be able to save space via differential backups.

• No backup scheduling
  Scheduled backups are only available for data backups, not drive backups.

• Cannot mount drive images
  The commercial products available allow you to mount a drive image backups like a drive, browse it and restore individual files. Ghost has had this feature for many years. This allows you to use drive image backups as data backups, as well.

• You can only store one backup image per drive
  Vista backup stores drive image backups in a folder named WindowsImageBackup on the drive being backed up to, which limits backups to one per drive. I have not found any way to browse for folders, create subfolders, etc. to allow storing multiple backup sets on the same disk. You can get around this by renaming the folder/files, but that makes automation hard and increases another maintenance step.

• Cannot validate backup images
  The other products like this I have used allow you to validate a drive image backup to check it for errors and verify it will restore properly. I could not find this feature in the Vista backup program.

Backup products I've tried

• Norton Ghost 14.0
  This was the first product I tried, simply because pre-Vista, I used Ghost successfully for many years. I still use Ghost 9 for my Windows XP PCs and we used Ghost exclusively for our in-house test PCs for many years. It just always worked. I didn't have such luck with Ghost 14.0, it didn't work for either of my 2 Vista PCs:
  - Vista Home Premium x64, HP, AMD Phenom 9550 quad core
  - Vista Business Ultimate x32, Dell, Intel Core Duo E8200A Symantec support technician remotely controlled one of the Vista PCs remotely for 2 full work days and couldn't come up with any reason for the failure. At this point, I figured I had wasted enough time with this product and went on to try something else.Symantec, $49

• Drive Snapshot 1.3
  Drive SnapShot was recommended by our network administrator. It's extremely simple to install and use (you can actually just use a single .exe file without any installation). I was also happy with the support Tom Ehlert, the software's author provided in figuring out how to allow me to boot from a boot disk and see the hard drives on the HP Vista x64 PC (set the SATA BIOS setting from the default RAID to IDE/legacy mode).I've done numerous backups using the 30 day eval version of Drive SnapShot, verified them and restored from them. It just works!

  DriveSnapshot.de, $39

• Acronis TrueImage 2009 Home
  I mostly tried TrueImage because anyplace I checked about what other people use and recommend, such as Server Fault, everyone spoke very highly of it, and boy were they right. This product just worked flawlessly from day one. The restore disk just figured out how to access the hard drive on the Vista x64 box without any messing around, the interface is really well done and easy to use. TrueImage allowed me to set up a scheduled incremental backup with compression very quickly and easily.It also comes with a truckload of extra features.I've done numerous backups using the 15 day eval version of TrueImage, verified them and restored from them. It also just works!

  Acronis, $49

There are lots of other products out there for this purpose, both commercial and free. I did not try all of them, nor do I intend to. My goal was to spend as little time as possible to find a reliable and reasonably priced backup solution.

Bottom line

The commercial drive image products I tested are worth every penny of the $39-$49 retail price that single non-server PC versions of these products typically cost. I chose Acronis TrueImage 2009 Home for my Vista backups. Being able to simply connect an external drive (or even a second internal drive) and use true "set it and forget it" mode backup with scheduled incremental backups is just wonderful and I know I won't forget to backup anything.

Update (07/19/2011): I've been working with the Windows 7 version of Backup and Restore Center built into the operating system and it solves many of the issues of the Vista version I reviewed above. It is a reasonable backup solution for most purposes.

• HP Pavilion, vintage 2004: this was my main work PC. It literally blew sparks one day. After that, the power supply was toast and the hard drive inaccessible. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because we could not justify the cost of replacing a hard drive and a power supply on a 4 year old PC.
• Dell workstation 360, vintage 2003: this was my wife's PC. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because again, we could not justify the cost of replacing just a hard drive on a 6 year old PC.
• Dell Inspiron, just under a year old: this is my main test PC that I run virtual machines on. I had to repartition and reformat the drive, then reinstall the operating system. It appeared ok for a short while, then started failing again. It turns out that there were memory problems. Dell eventually replaced the RAM (another long story there, but not today) and now it seems ok.

I thought I was pretty good about back ups before all of these problems happened. Yet after so many failures in a relative short amount of time, you really find out whether your backup strategy is working or not. Mine clearly was not. Some drive images were several months old, some data wasn't being backed up frequently enough and some not at all. I lost a lot of time due to:

• Having to reinstall Windows and/or numerous applications from scratch
• Getting data back from various places (source control, external drives, network)
• Simply not realizing what I did and did not have backed up.

At some time when we were discussing this mess, my boss Stephen said something to the effect of "If you don't have a full drive backup, you don't have a backup." I now realize how right he was -- don't tell him! . 

Now I use scheduled backups on my daily working PCs and created a schedule in my Outlook calendar to remind me to back up the other PCs every two weeks. I bought a couple of big external drives (750 GB and 1.5 TB) and now have enough room for multiple drive image backups for each PC, so I can "roll back" to any of several drive revisions.

There are so many benefits to doing full drive image backups:

• You know you have everything backed up. No more "did I backup X before this crash"?
• It's inexpensive: hard drives, including ready-to-use external drives, are cheaper than ever before.
• It's easy: most drive image backup software today has true "set it and forget it" modes, with backup scheduling.
• Most drive imaging software today allows you to mount a drive image as a drive so you can view and retrieve individual folders and files from them, so drive image backups can also serve as data backup (within limits).

Remember to actually test restoring of your backup images, so the first time you try it isn't after a drive failure. That's a bad time to find out that it doesn't work!