New
#11
It's not worth the trouble to create a bootable Recovery partition with your customized Win7 image or the Win7 installer booting from it, because it defeats the purpose of having the image available if the HD fails. So saving the image on an external HD gives you backup against this and is also much easier.
Besides, saving a backup image after setup with all of your programs and settings makes it infinitely easier to recover and thus the best method overall.