Just came across this tutorial on Windows 7 Backup and thought I'd share it here.

Nice.

Thanks!

I'm seriously thinking about dumping Acronis True Image. Their support has been reduced to 1 month, anything after that is on a per incident basis. They also have a terrible lack of concern for people losing data. If I could find something reasonably equivalent I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Norton Ghost is not an option either, tried it, did not like it. Ditto for Cobian backup. Not a bad interface but it does not do any compression so takes a lot more space than I'm willing to dedicate to backups.

They (Acronis) also, never, ever upgrade older products to work with a new OS. For instance, I bought ATI 2009 in June, and they now say you need to buy ATI 2010 to get Windows 7 compatibility, and 1 whole month of support, whoopie!

The more I use Win7 the more impressed I am with it. I had been playing with Windows Home Server to backup all my networked systems but it kept losing track of it's own drives so I lost confidence in it to keep my data safe. I put Win7 on that machine too and back up all my systems to it using Win7's backup and it seems to be working well. Of course the true test is to wipe out my main system and see if I can recover - not ready to do that, but feel if forced, this will work.

There are several tutorials around, this one seems to be one of the better. Thanks.

Bill, are you using the built-in Windows Backup or some other software?

Maybe I need to spend some time with Windows Backup and see if it does what I need.

I have not seen anything about what you can do with data that has been backed up via Windows Backup. Can you access it down to the file level like you can with Acronis or Ghost?

Windows Backup and yes, you can restore a single file, folder, or image - or at least that is how it appears. I have can drill down into the back up and select individual files and then have the option to restore to original location, or elsewhere. I have not tried restoring an image file.

Excellent. I'm thoroughly ticked at Acronis so I think I'll give Windows Backup a try.

Time to read about it more and see how you restore when needed.

Tried Windows Backup. It failed at about 12% during the image backup when a Comodo popup occurred for what it thought was a suspected virus (I use Comodo Internet Security). I'm not impressed. Acronis TI 2009 has no problem doing full or incremental backups so as much as I dislike ATI I'm going to have to stay with it, at least for now.

I'm still running RC1, won't have my retail Win 7 Pro until the end of next week, when I get to start this over again, from scratch. Actually should be fun.

That's too bad. I must admit, I have become disenchanted with Comodo lately simply because of too many false positives.

I have been giving Microsoft Security Essentials a try - something to consider since it seems to be kicking some but lately - now rated the best free AV!

Microsoft Security Essentials rated best free antivirus for Windows

Thanks for this but this was written back in February when 7 beta had just been release publicly. Surely it has changed since then. Also to note is that the network backup is only available in Pro or Ultimate (compare editions).