Backing up your system just means the files are copied somewhere else. A complete system backup will also often include a recovery disk that you can boot from in order to restore the files you had backed up. Alternatively, you may have to reinstall your OS before starting the data recovery. The recovery process will copy the files back on to your system, so for example, you won't have a problem with defragmentation. A disk image is a byte for byte copy of your hard drive. The recovery will just lay the bits back onto the harddrive in the same state they were when the disk image was created. For example, the resulting harddrive will be just as defragmented as when the image was created. A true disk image wouldn't even care what OS was installed or how the hard drive was partitioned. I'm not up on my disk partitioning solutions, but I suspect there are utilities now that you can run under Windows and create something similar to a disk image, at least of the Windows partition. I'm not sure how else you could do this with accessibility. I assume these tools also try to just grab the part of the disk that's being used so that the image of an 80G harddrive wouldn't be 80G. On 22/04/11 20:21, Chris Smart wrote: > At 02:01 PM 4/22/2011, you wrote: >> Are you talking about making an image of your disk or backing up your >> system so you can restore it? > > > Uh oh, I thought they were basically the same thing. I guess I'll > have to do some googling and reading on the two approaches. > > Chris > > > __________� > > View the list's information and change your settings at > //www.freelists.org/list/jawsscripts > -- Christopher (CJ) chaltain@xxxxxxxxx __________� View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/jawsscripts