I hope that some of this may be useful to other users to help them avoid catastrophic loss of data which they think has been secured by Windows Backup. I have recently had cause to try out the various features of the Windows 7 Recovery Disk. My conclusion is that the built-in System Recovery features of Windows 7 are so limited that they should be considered useless. I am using Windows 7 Ultimate and expected something a little better than this. Some limitations: 1) As it extensively documented elsewhere System Restore is almost completely unable to function in the presence of any anti-virus / anti-spyware tools (which may lock files or 'protect themselves' from intrusion using standard methods). Despite haing access to volume shadow copies and operating system privileges it often fails to create a restore point correctly, and apparently always fails to restore a drive when the operating system is actlve. This is true even if the anti-virus / anti-spyware / firewall tools are all deactivated. Apparently Microsoft recommend de-installation of the security tools as the 'solution'. As far as I can see even Windows Defender causes this problem. The only method of recovering a restore point is to boot the machine from a Recovery Disk. When I discovered this limitation it set me to investigating other aspects of Recovery. 2) I recently upgraded my old keyboard (purple plug) to a brand-new Microsoft USB keyboard. Despite creating a brand new Recovery Disk using the Windows 7 menus it is impossible to boot the Recovery Disk using the new Microsoft USB keyboard. Note that this is not a problem of BIOS limitation - I can access the BIOS (and use Windows 7) entirely well using the new USB keyboard. I can also boot a Linux recovery disk with the new keyboard. However the first action of booting the Windows Recovery Disk is a prompt "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD". "Any key" can only be on the old style keyboard. The new Microsoft USB keyboard is not recognised by the Recovery Disk boot prompt - even when the Recovery Disk is created with Windows booted using the new keyboard to ensure that the keyboard is known to the operating system and that the drivers are loaded. 3) If ANY change is made to the Windows ("C") partition the only way to recover data from a Backup requires completely refomatting of ALL partitions on the same physical drive. This applies even if there is adequate space on the C partition without reformatting it. This applies even if there is adequate space on physical drive to reformat the C partition without affecting the other partitions. For example I created a drive with three user partitions: C (windows), D (user data seperated for convenience of backup and recovery), E (photos and videos which are archived seperately) Having installed Windows 7 and used it for some time I realised that I did not need as much space on the C partition as I had originally created. So I tried to shrink the C partition - however even turning off system restore and all indexing I still had an imovable "system volume information" object preventing me shrinking the paritition as I wished. It seemed logical therefore to backup the C partition and recreate a smaller C partition to which I could then recover the operating system. However the Recovery Disk detects that the C partition has changed and only offers the option to Reformat the entire physical medium - including the unaffacted D and E partitions. This is absolutely ridiculous (and unnecessary). Even if Windows Recovery is being hopelessly simplistic and requires that the Windows Boot loader is located at precisely the same physical position as it was when the backup was made, this does not mean that the partition has to be identical. And it does not mean that the other partitions on the physical disk have to be erased and reformatted in any circumstance. Given that "chkdisk" can be run at boot, it should be possible to re-size the active partition to a reasonable degree without breaking the operating system or backup process. 4) The use of file extension lists for Windows Backup of user data is a serious flaw. For example I keep copies of downloaded (third party) software installations in case I need to re-instal and aas a record of what I have installed. Windows backup is configured to omit executable files from a backup of users data - hence if I use it to backup the 'users files' I loose all my archive of installed software applications. It is not even possible to add these files to the list, nor to select "all file types". The result is that the only way to make a backup is to force a "complete system backup" (full drive) each time I make a backup. The advertised "features" of Windows backup are in fact a hindrance to a good backup proceedure. 5) Another silly bug on the Recovery Disk. When the Recovery Disk is booted it (of course) takes the "C:" drive letter. This means that the Windows partition (usually "C:") gets renamed (in my case to "G:"). When the Recovery Disk boots the first thing it does it to give an error message stating that there is a problem with the boot information (which is stored in the hidden system recovery partition on the hard drive). The details of this message show that it thinks that an additional boot entry is required for the "system" partition on drive letter "G". ie. it wants to add a Boot entry corresponding to the temporarily re-named system drive, which only exists when in the Recovery Disk environment. Such an additional entry is of course completely useless and unnecessary as the system partition will be labelled "C:" as soon as the machine is booted normally. This bug is so blatantly obvious that it brings into question as to whether anyone really ever even tried using a Systen Recovery Disk during the development of Windows. My conclusion at present is that the available free Linux based tools are no worse and seem to offer several potential advantages (for example they may not configure my graphics card properly, but at least they work with Microsofts own USB keyboard and permit me to resize the partitions).

I have 7 ultimate 64bit, and I was very impressed with the backup and recovery system, it allows for full system image backup, and complete data backup. I set up dual boot w/ vista, and use vpc with XPmode in 7. I only use 7 for backup, it backs up everything. And I did restore my system once, just to see how well it worked, it was complete to the restore point, auto backup should be performed on a regular schedule. 7 will not allow backup to an OS drive, you can Partition but if the drive fails, all fails. I use an external usb drive for backup only. I have never been a fan of resizing partitions once the drive has been wrote too. You should go to the Western Digital website and view their videos on how their drives work.

Thanks for your reply. I understand that you have "never been a fan of resizing partitions" but Microsoft Windows 7 provides a facility to do this in the Device Manager. Either a) resizing is a bad idea in which case it should not be made available in the Device Manager without a warning. Or b) resizing is acceptable, in which case Windows 7 Backup should not fail catastrophically when the disk is resized to a size which is compatible with the data. In fact the most likely situation that will give rise to this problem of different sized partitions is if there is a hard drive crash. A replacement hard drive will almost certainly be a different size. Backup will insist on re-creating the exact same partitions as on the original drive - even it if this is not necessary to do so. Also consider a RAID - a user might add a new drive to the RAID. This will increase the partition size of at least on partition. This could apparently invalidate all previous backups - depending on which partitions flagged as being saved (even if they have not been saved). Note further that Windows 7 Backup uses absolutely no compression on the System Backup. It only uses a basic "zip" compression of the user data. For example: on my PC the system backup image is around 20GB. I use 7z to compress this to around 5GB before archiving it. It's absolutely ridiculous wasting so much hard drive space storing backups - this renders Windows Backup unsuitable for managing System backups. My experience of incremental backup in Windows Vista has lead me to force a complete backup each time I run it. A friend made a full system backup of a laptop when the laptop was new. The backup was around 25GB, on an external hard drive. After a couple of years (!) a new backup was made to the same external drive. (I would not recommend waiting so long). The new backup was around 25GB according to Windows Backup. I was surprised to learn that Windows had made the second backup "incrementally", as there was such a long time between them. On inspection I found that the total disk space used by the two 25GB backups in "incremental" mode was 75GB! All I can guess is that Windows had stored 25GB of data initially, and then added 25GB of file data deletion information, followed by 25GB of new data. Note that one should not only make regular backups, but keep historical backups in case you loose data but don't discover the loss immediately. I'd recommend that at least one complete backup per month should be archived semi-permanently in a medium which is stored seperately from the regular (weekly or daily) backup. Having a little experience of hard drives and EIDE/PATA controllers I can assure you that the file system is a logical construct applied to the data which is stored on the hard drive. As such the drive neither 'knows' nor 'cares' whether the filesystem is NTFS, FAT, EXT2 or whatever. Neither does it care about the arrangement of the filesystems into partitions. A partition is effectively a series of LBAs (logical block addresses) which is delimited by pointer information (the partition table). So resizing a partition consists of nothing more than adjusting the pointers, and possibly writing some filesystem (formatting) information. So long as the software calculates the new LBAs, and ensures that the filesystem objects are adjusted correctly, then the process is transparent to the drive hardware. Unless there is something very broken with the way windows resizes partitions then I can't see that it matters to the hardware. (PS. I could not find any reference on WD site to information or video of how their drives function so I suspect you might have found your reference elsewhere).