does the windows 7 backup do everything Ghost & Acronis will do?

I want to create a full DISK IMAGE, ie: one big file so if I need to restore my whole hard drive, I can.

Does Win 7 backup do that?

Yes
Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

Bansaw said:

I want to create a full DISK IMAGE, ie: one big file so if I need to restore my whole hard drive, I can.

Does Win 7 backup do that?

Yes, windows image backup will restore your drive.

Both Ghost and Acronis will allow you to create multiple images and restore to your drive. Both will allow you to pick directories and files from the images and restore them.

If you have multiple partitions on your hard disk, I recommend Acronis which is really cheap and works. It will do incremental and full disk/partition backups.
I buy acronis for $25 from the user group store at ugr.com which is the cheapest place. but something tells me that Acronis might be having a cyber monday sale that you can get in on. don't know about symantec and ghost but they all are hungry at this time of the year. :)
Rich

Sardonicus said:

Yes
Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

thanks,

lets say my laptop was stolen. I have the backup on an external HDD in my house.
Can I BROWSE that backup (made with the inbuilt Win7 backup tool) and extract individual files?

Not easily. You have to mount the VHD. It is easier with all other imaging programs I know - Macrium, Paragon, Acronis, etc.

But you can also use the Wbadmin which is a built in cmd function and creates a VHD file.

Example: WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:f: -include:e:

F is the drive to which you image
E is the partition you image