I used this the other night to backup my laptop. Worked great and very easy to use. I'm lazy and prefer to image the entire thing just in case it fails.

I heard about on the weekly Tekzilla show on Revision3.com. Awesome show by the way!

I assume you're talking about Macrimum Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp), mentioned on Tekzilla Episode 111 (http://revision3.com/tekzilla/windows7).

I have used Macrimum Reflect in the past to successfully image and restore in XP, but when I imaged my Vista drive, I discovered that it didn't back up ANYTHING in my user profile - no favorites, documents, etc. Maybe I just needed to run this as an administrator, but I went back to using my old favorite DriveImage XML (http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm). I have used DIXML in everything from 98 to the new Win7, and it has never let me down.

I've seen a review of another one, Selfimage, at freewaregenius.com (http://www.freewaregenius.com/2007/01/30/selfimage/). Haven't used this one personally. One person's favorite may not work well for someone else, so it's always good to have alternates.

Also, I think the backup built into Win7 may be the best one yet from Microsoft. The backups are saved in standard zip files (along with an assortment of other ancillary files, such as xml). If you ever need to restore some files, and cannot do so from within Win7, you can still get to your files with any standard archive program such as 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org).

I forgot to post the link... Thanks! I'm an old school Ghost imaging person. Still blows my mind that you can backup the OS with the OS open and running. Not sure if my old version of Ghost that I boot from USB will work with Vista or Win7 though.

Try it and post your success or failure. If it doesn't work, you at least have some alternatives that probably will. I like DriveImage XML, and it comes the closest to a non-proprietary image format, so if you ever need to restore data without benefit of the program, that is at least a possibility. The database is in standard xml format, but I'm not sure what you can actually extract the data with. If I find out, I'll post.