"Mike Hall - MVP" wrote in message
...
Whoa up, y'all. NTBackup is not that bad. It may not be overly useful
for the average home user, but it does have it uses in the right
places.

Acronis TrueImage is not always the answer either. How many average
users make an image of a system having just set it up fresh? More
often that not, they don't. They wait until they are having problems.

snip

What has any of that got to do with the OP's question? He wants to use
ASR which performs logical file restore (after installing a minimal
instance of Windows). ASR needs the floppy, the Windows install CD, and
the .bkf backup files. ASR is going to wipe out whatever was there and
perform a restore from the logical file backup files. Okay, and with
ANY backups (logical file or physical sector), the user will lose any
changes or files that were created after the last backup.

You remark about when users save partition images. Well, those same
users don't perform logical file backups on a daily basis, either. Even
if the backups were performed daily, you still lose any files that were
changed after the last backup. Windows (pre-Vista) has no file
versioning system; i.e., when you change or delete files, there is no
old copy left around from which you can recover. I've heard the Vista
tries to do a basic file versioning scheme but it really is just an
automatic backup scheme and is still not the same as a file versioning
system. So no matter what scheme a Windows user uses, they can and
probably will lose files, especially the latest created or modified
files.

As far as asking users when they last saved a partition image and
getting a blank look from them, asking them when they last did a
[logical file] backup also gets the "deer caught in headlights" stare
from them. If a user knows about performing backups and does them
regularly, if not daily or before and after every major OS or app
change, then they already know when it is appropriate to do the restores
and what they will lose in those restores.