Conclusion
There's something to be said for a batch of programs where even the most basic and stripped-down one of the bunch is decently recommendable. Picking the absolute best of the bunch is tough, since the competition between the best comes down to which features you would rather buy for how much.

		Five Recovery Apps
		•  Introduction •  Acronis True Image •  Image for Windows •  Norton Save And Restore •  Paragon Drive Backup •  R-Drive Image •  Conclusion
		•  Full Backup Gotchas

Image for Windows carried the lowest price tag and the smallest feature set (no differential backups, no file/folder backups), but it also carried the least bulk and got the job done with little or no difficulty. I liked Norton Backup and Restore for being the most flexible, and it did have some of the best features overall, but it also carried the most heft. However, my personal favorite, Acronis True Image, had almost the same mix of features as Symantec's offering and carried a lot less bulk.

Paragon Drive Backup is even more lightweight (it installs almost nothing to the PC other than the executable itself), but lacks the ability to do individual folder backups, so if you don't mind not having that feature it's a good alternative. R-Drive is missing some of the features of the other programs in its price class, but its simplicity of design may be a redeeming factor for people who don't need those functions.

	Full Backup Gotchas
	As wonderfully convenient as it is to back up and restore a whole system at once, there's still a few ways you can get bitten if you're not careful. Here are some common gotchas to be mindful of when using bare-metal recovery tools in Windows: Make sure you can restore what you've created. Verify that you can restore from the hardware you're backing up to. If you're using an external drive, boot your recovery disc and make sure that the backup set you've made can be seen and read from it. Watch out for hardware changes. If you image a full system with one set of hardware and then change something, the original image may go haywire on you if you try to restore it. This could manifest as anything from a system that simply won't boot -- for instance, if you've changed disk controllers -- to odd behavior with peripherals. Beware of Product Activation. This is a corollary to the first issue, but it deserves its own discussion. Restoring to a system that has a significantly different hardware profile than the one you backed up the image from may cause our old friend Product Activation to kick in. If you have no choice but to restore to a significantly-different system (i.e., more than three pieces of key hardware have changed), activate by phone, as you'll get more of an opportunity to verify that you're not pirating anything. A handy third-party utility called XPInfo lets you examine which pieces of hardware are profiled for Product Activation. Invest well in your backups. The easiest, fastest and most cost-effective backup solution at this point is a second hard drive. That said, don't just buy any old hard drive for backups. Spend the money on an enterprise-class hard drive with a three-year (or better) warranty, and get the same for your PC as well whenever you can manage it. The last thing you want to do is discover that your backup and your main system drive are both toast. If you back up to DVD, use name-brand blank discs and not store-generic varieties that have no pedigree. Know your disk geometry. If you restore to a new hard drive that's bigger than the one you had before, be mindful of the partition sizes you're restoring to. Most of the time you can resize the restored partition proportionately, so you can make full use of the new drive; if you have this option, use it.