Recently, I purchased the
Acronis True Image 11.0 Home software so I could image my hard drives onto an external drive. My only previous (lackluster) experience with imaging was about 5 years ago with Norton Ghost. I've been very pleased with the Acronis software so far and found it extrememly easy to use.
Installing the software and making an exact image of my hard drives took a lot less time than I expected. It was extremely simple to set up a scheduled task to backup nightly (specifying after how many backups to make a completely new image). I set it up to run at night, and for the first couple days I checked to make sure it had run successfully, but all appears to be working perfectly! A full image makes it simple to restore your machine in a lot less time that reinstalling the OS and loading all the programs again, as well as having all your data intact. You can also select from incremental or differential backups, or make a complete new image each time - whatever suits you.
They have a lot of features for standard backup of data only (which a lot of software has, and Windows can do pretty well without additional software anyway) and some pretty nice features like "Try & Decide" which creates a "safe" place to download software, files, etc, and lets you try them out before actually making the permanent necessary changes to your system. Thus, if something turns out to be useless, doesn't function well - or worse - it's easy to get back to where you were before the install without a lot of time and trouble. (Hmmm...someone I know was having issues with recently installed upgrades...Philip - you might want to consider this one!)
Overall I'm pretty pleased with my choice. The two biggest names out there for imaging are Acronis and Symantec (Norton) and since I won't use any Norton products due to my own personal preferences, this seemed the way to go. I needed something that would work on Vista. and the price tag was $49.99, a small price to pay for the hours of saved aggrevation if I were to need to start all over again. So, if you happen to be in the market for imaging software I strongly suggest at least considering
Acronis True Image.
