Vista Backup and Imaging Confusion

If one word comes to mind to describe Microsoft after looking into their backup solutions, that word must be "Bumbling". We've all heard comments about big unweildly organizations like "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing". Unfortunately, in this context, that comment is quite limiting. You see, it only assumes two hands - right and left. What if there are four hands?

What am I getting at? I'll explain.

I've always been an enthusiastic devourer of new IT technology. Sometimes it is rewarding (started using Linux in 1993 and haven't looked back) and sometimes it can be very disappointing(Zetera SAN). Like many others, I eagerly awaited the launch of Windows Vista. Now, I'm no Microsoft zealot, but I use Windows quite a lot, and am always interested in something new out of Redmond. So, like many others, I was interested in what was coming up next with Vista. Because I run a few test machines, I'm very interested in system imaging software. Years of painful trial-and-error led me to choose Ghost as my imager of choice. I was quite happy and comfortable in the knowledge that I could use Ghost to image my test systems, and switch between images for further testing, whether the operating system happened to be DOS, Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP, Linux(ext3), OS/2, or BeOS. Even multi-boot environments with multiple Operating systems and a boot manager could be imaged and re-deployed later on the same hardware, with one simple command.

All that changed with Vista. First, Microsoft upgraded NTFS in a way that Ghost could not understand it. Additionally, Microsoft claimed to have come out with this vastly improved backup and imaging solution that can be used to easily restore your computer. But the more I looked into it, the more confused and varied it became. So far what I've found is 4 different backup and imaging solutions, with 3 different backup file formats, none of which are compatible with each other. The waste and duplication, not to mention the inconvenience of multiple formats that can or can't be used depending on the situation, boggles the mind.

Before going any further, here is a summary of the four backup and imaging solutions:

1. Windows Backup - This is new in Vista. It backs up a lot of your files and settings but does NOT image your entire computer. To do a restore in the case of a catastrophe, you would have to redeploy Vista from scratch first, install your favourite software, and then restore from the backup. It produces a directory of many small .zip files for each backup, as well as a bunch of other small files which are probably metadata about the contents of the .zips. It is available in all versions of Vista.
   
2. Windows Complete PC Backup - This one is available in Vista "business and up" which means it is not available in the Home versions. It does a complete backup of your PC, creating an image that you can use to completely redeploy your system in the even of a catastrophic drive failuer - WITH LIMITS. It is VERY annoyingly hobbled in that it will only back up to externally attached devices (such as USB, eSATA, or Firewire drives), or to blank CDs or DVDs. It will NOT back up to a NAS. Further, many people have reported inabilities to restore to different drives from these backups - especially to smaller drives. Personally I have tried about 5 restores from This type of backup, and only 1 has worked. This type of backup produces a directory with a large .vhd file (and a bunch of smaller supporting files which presumably contain metadata) containing an image of your disk.
3. WBADMIN Backup - This one is available on any version of Vista. However, it is CLI-only and requires some diligent application of your propeller-beanie. On the surface, it seems to be very similar to option 2 above. It produces a similar looking .vhd file and supporting files, but there are very distinct differences in the behaviour of this option. First, it allows you to restore to any size of drive, larger or smaller, without restriction. Second, it allows you to store the backup on a NAS. This type of backup has been my most successful method of backing up Vista and getting it back after a drive change. There is one big caveat however: despite being superficially similar, backups created by WBAdmin are not readable by Complete PC Restore, and backups created with Complete PC Backup are not readable by wbadmin.
4. ImageX Backup - This is Microsoft's "enterprise" backup strategy. It is available as a free download (part of WAIK) and can be used to image any version of Vista. It is CLI-only, although the same method is used by the WDS GUI if you have a network infrastructure and the proper licensing to run it. It stores your backup in one single .wim file. This file can be used to store multiple revisions of backups from multiple computers, and it will use a "Single Instance Storage" procedure to minimize the waste of space. I have successfully redeployed Vista from ImageX backups after changing a boot hard drive, but I have tended to use option 3 above because after backing up several PCs to a single .wim file with ImageX, the backups become quite slow as they search the wim file for duplicate blocks for Single Instance space saving, and my .wim file became colossally huge, giving me an "oh crap I have all my eggs in one basket" feeling. Of note, this is also the format used to package all versions of Vista on the installation DVDs.
   

Much more could be said about the above backup strategies, but to my mind the bigger and more important consideration is to look at the entire situation and ask "WHY?"

Why does Microsoft have three different backup file formats? Why do they have four different and incompatible backup strategies? Do they actually have 3 or 4 different backup teams all working in different parts of the Redmond campus, who never cooperate with each other and are all competing to make their little backup strategy the winner? What possible reason could there be to justify this kind of needless duplication? Especially, what kind of justification is there for putting all 4 into the shipping product? Might it be just possible that they could work together and make ONE backup and imaging strategy that works even better? Maybe actually put a basic GUI to it? As it is, ImageX looks and acts like Ghost did, over 10 years ago. This is one example of waste in Vista that I've found so far - I wonder what other kind of needless waste is hidden under the hood in parts of Vista that I cannot see?

And, if I might rant for a bit, because this needs to be said: Microsoft has some very interesting documentation of their ImageX imaging strategy, where they lay claim to "file based imaging" as a big new idea that they have come up with, and which is a bold new invention, taking system imaging a quantum leap ahead of the more limited "raw disk-based imaging" that all the other disk imaging vendors use. I have to ask this - what kind of drugs are they on? Have they actually ever tried to use Ghost before saying things like this? Ghost has done file-based imaging for over a decade before they "invented" it for ImageX. If you take a ghost image of a 100Gig disk with 23Gigs of files on it. Your Ghost image is 23Gigs, not 100Gigs. Also, you can use Ghost Explorer to browse the contents of the image and extract whatever files you need. Furthermore, when you restore the image, Ghost is very clear about the fact that it is restoring files, and your system actually runs faster after this restore, because you've had a gratuitous defrag at the same time as Ghost restored FILES one by one. Hello, Microsoft? We're not complete idiots out here. We can tell when you're blowing smoke.

This whole backup muddle is something I look forward to being simplified in Windows 7.