It’s as if it’s there because they needed to have something – they needed to check a box – not because they wanted to create a really good robust backup system. That could and should be readable not only by Windows 7 backup, but by other programs as well.Īnd lastly, Windows 7’s backup just feels like an afterthought in many ways. That just doesn’t help you if you’ve moved to, say, Windows 7 and need to recover a file from an old backup. Windows XP backup images, as I understand it, are readable only by Windows XP backup.

Microsoft has a very poor track record with maintaining backup compatibility across Windows versions. The big risk I see with using Windows 7’s own backup program is actually kind of an odd one.

Some sense that the backups are reliable and will be there when you need them.The ability to restore not only a full image, but to extract individual files from that image.A controlled and obvious way of managing your disk space so that you know what you’re getting.Full image backups that you can schedule to happen automatically.It’s one of the reasons I wrote my book, Saved: Backing Up With Windows 7 Backup. While it’s capable of doing all the things that I feel are necessary, it’s not at all obvious. That being said it is, as I said, the first backup program to come with Windows where I feel comfortable saying, yes, if you do nothing else, go ahead and use it. You have little control over just where things go, and not a lot of control over exactly how the backups are created. One of the biggest issues I have with Windows 7’s program is that I have a very hard time telling exactly what it’s doing. Because backups are so incredibly important, I want things to be clear and complete. In Windows 7, the interface for backing up data only is confusingly melded with the interface for creating full image backups. While the Windows 7 backup program is perhaps the first utility built into Windows that meets what I consider the bare minimum necessary for a backup program, I definitely prefer solutions like Reflect. But the term “disk imaging utility” really implies, to me, a lot more functionality than the Windows 7 backup program actually has. Yes, it can create what we would call an image backup. To begin with, I wouldn’t call Windows 7’s backup program a disk imaging program exactly.

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