Safest bet to just use Windows 7 "Backup and Restore" feature?

Have you tried to mount the vhd image to extract files? TI offers additional features and for my system - image, clone, incremental, differential, tasks, mounting, recovery and try and decide all work fine. While this isn't the case with many posting here, I won't be changing from TI unless Win 7 vhd includes more features.

Steven, that's exactly what I'm going to do. As I posted in another thread, TI 2010 actually corrupted my Win 7 machine yesterday and now it won't boot, so I'm going to have to restore a backup or reinstall completely if the restore function doesn't work properly.

The built in Windows backup tool seems to work just fine as far as I can tell, and at least if I have problems with it, I can get free support from Microsoft under my Windows license. Not so with Acronis. It seems like Acronis is more interested in corporate customers these days and is kind of leaving the home users out to dry. Too bad, because True Image does have some cool features.

If you use the Windows B&R, remember that in order to have more than one backup, you have to rename the default backup folder "Windows Image Backup", otherwise the next backup will overwrite the first backup.
True Image definitely has more versatility than Windows B&R. I like to choose the destination folder and the name for my backups. Windows doesn't let you do this - it will only let you choose which hard drive to put the default backup folder. It also creates a bunch of small files as part of the backup.

Actually, you don't need to rename the backup folder "Windows Image Backup", but you can if you want. The next backup does not overwrite the first backup if you don't rename; the next backup creates an incremental image. Subsequent backups are incremental.

Windows Backup has a rather unique method of accomplishing this. The output of the backup is a set of virtual hard disks in .vhd format. Each time that you do another backup, the virtual hard disk files are updated to reflect the current contents of the partition(s), and the older changed sectors are moved into shadow storage. When you go to restore a backup, the user interface will let you choose any of the incremental images including the latest one. Windows can then reconstruct the disk at any previous date by using the latest virtual hard disk and combining it with the previous sector contents in shadow storage.

If you think about it, this is rather bass-akwards from the way most incremental backup solutions work. With TI, for example, if you have a base image and a bunch of incremental images, the most recent backup is the one that is LEAST likely to survive because it depends on having the base image and all subsequent incremental images in good shape. With Window imaging, the most recent backup is the one that is MOST likely to survive, because it depends only on having the virtual hard disk intact. If any of the changed sectors are lost, you can still recover the most recent backup but not any of the previous versions.

I agree that Windows Imaging leaves a lot to be desired. It is very inflexible, and it consumes a lot of space due to the fact that the image files are not compressed like TI. The inflexibility bothers me the most - you cannot, for example, choose to restore only one of three partitions; you cannot resize, nor can you rearrange the disk layout on-the-fly like you can with TI. However, it does satisfy the basic requirements of an imaging program - you can create, restore, and mount images to extract files.

I forgot to mention mounting - a new feature of Windows 7 Disk Management is that you can directly mount virtual hard disks:

Since the output of Windows Backup is in Virtual Hard Disk format then this means that you can mount a backup and extract files from it. And like TI, the image can be mounted in either read-only or read/write mode. Or, if you have Virtual PC installed, you can mount the images and open them in Virtual PC.

I played around with Windows Imaging for a few weeks and then came running back to TI.

Thanks for the detailed post, Mark. I didn't know Windows Backup could mount virtual disks, or the ins-and-outs of its incremental strategy. I don't like Windows Backup's inflexibility or the way that it's oversimplified into sort of a "black box" type of solution where it's not really clear exactly what it's doing or how it's doing it. However, since the Windows 7 beta test market was so huge, I'm *hoping* that it is at least fairly stable and bug-free.

I would definitely prefer to stick with TI for its feature set, but unfortunately, I just don't trust the reliability of TI 2010, at least not on Windows 7. (It does seem to work OK on my older XP machine, so I will probably leave that install running.) Judging from the number of reports on this forum -- despite the fact that most casual users probably wouldn't find this forum or bother to use it -- Acronis has really dropped the ball on quality assurance for the 2010 release.

I suppose the issue could be a compatibility problem with my motherboard / disks, but I've had zero issues with my hardware setup for the last year under Vista. I'm running a recent ASUS motherboard with a standard Intel I/O chipset, too, so it's not like I'm using some weird off-brand stuff...

I'll watch this space and if Acronis responds in good faith and seems to be making an effort to set things right, maybe I'll give them another shot, but TI 2010 is just not ready for prime time right now.