The Windows 7 automatic full backups to an external hard drive works great. I've had to do about a dozen restores with it. The restore process is: boot off win7 dvd. Select recovery and it'll find the backup, confirm everything, and come back in about an hour to a complete restore of everything just like it was when it was backed up. All programs, data, settings, etc., exact. The key is, just make sure you're doing the backups.