Acronis True Image is great! I use it at home to run all my backups. You can do a lot with the software. You can make full backup (image) of your entire computer or just one or more partitions. As Stardogg states you can do a lot with the backup file that it creates as well. You can restore that image to a hard drive, you can mount the image and view your data as a virtual disk, and you can also just browse the image and pull out individual files as needed. that's how I use it mostly for my backups. They run on a schedule that I setup. I also like to take an image of my server from time to time (just the C partition) if ever I have a problem with it blowing up on me. Or if I build a new computer like when I went to Windows 7. You can get the computer to the point of a "base Image" meaning you have all the hardware working, drivers installed, main apps installed. Then make an image of it and store it someplace off that computer (for me I store them on my server). then if I ever need to rebuild my computer for what ever reason I can just restore the image I created and I don't have to waste the day installing from scratch. As an example of how cool it is I made an image of my laptop that was connected to my network wirelessly from my backup computer to my server. heheheh.

We used to use a program called Ghost for doing this back in the day. Ghost is still around I believe but Acronis is better imo.
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I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money.''