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Acronis True Image Home 2011 vs. Windows 7 Ultimate system image question

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I have Windows 7 Ultimate and was thinking of getting Acronis True Image Home 2011. I read that Acronis' product is the best for creating a system image and backups. My friend has both and creates images of his hard drives, so far the only advantage i see that Acronis has over Windows 7 is that its system images are created faster. I was thinking of getting Acronis True Image 2011 but in what way is it better in creating a system image over Windows 7 system imaging ability? My question is, besides speed, is Acronis' True Image software any more reliable than that created by Windows 7 or in any way better besides speed? The speed and slightly smaller size of the image isn't a big concern for me and I don't care about continuous backups or anything other than creating a system image of a drive.

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Indeed, Acronis imaging produces smaller images (eg 12GB versus 34GB on my system), somewhat faster.
The big problem I have with Windows 7 imaging is how it manages image versions. Other older images can be available in shadow copies on the disk where you store the image, if you have system protection ON for that disk. But even in this case, your history is limited by the capacity Windows has by default for images in shadow copies (option to let Windows manage versions of images is ON). Having a deep and long history of your backups is very useful when a problem is not detected right away; I know this from experience...
That particular point of how versions are managed is what pushed me over to Acronis. I end up using Windows 7 imaging as a redundant backup on top of Acronis images, on another disk.