I once used these imaging programs, and while they're nice on the front end, when you go to restory you HD, it's another story altogether — one that usually involves a nightmare of configuration. Better, cheaper, and faster is to use one of the zip backup programs. AM-Zip by Aignes (http://hunterdavis.com/ssrss.html) allows you to use its own zip or any other external ZIP/RAR/PAR compression software you want. And it's really, really fast. I backed up an 850Mb folder in less than one minute!