Running in a professional IT environment (no slights intended!), it isnt practical to keep a block based image of every workstation in the office, on the network. The original system backup, of a large workstation, has to be properly managed, because many users have 100s of GBs of data; some may have over a TB of data, on a workstation. You cant keep a block based image, for comparison, online, for all users. You still need some mechanism for performing differential or incremental backups, of large workstations. This may take a bit more time to perform, but you need the option of trading time off against online storage. Also, I don't seem to see any mechanism for starting a backup, when the system is "idle", the way that XP's backup worked. You can pretty much count on the fact that, if a workstation is idle for 15 minutes, they've gone for lunch or a meeting and you can take a quick differential (or incremental)...So I'm still feeling something's missing in 7's backup facility...

Windows Backup is incremental backup. Can you describe the detail issues you encountered? Regarding the second question, you can try to change the configuration in Task Scheduler. Please: 1. Open "Task Scheduler". 2. Locate to Microsoft\Windows\WindowsBackup3. In the right pane, double-click AutomaticBackup. 4. Click the tab Conditions.5. Check the box "Start the task only if the computer is idle for". Change the idle time and other configurations as you want.Arthur Xie - MSFT