Vista - What is your backup/recovery/file sharing strategy

I have been interested to note that large numbers of forum members have home networks that consist of multiple PC's w/diff OS's and it made me wonder what backup/restore/file sharing strategies people have put in place to help them with the management of their networks.

Now....I like to play/overclock/tweak/etc or windows update/Nvidia drivers/ Java upgrades/ etc sometimes break something unexpectedly which ends up with me needing to recover files, drivers and/or something else. I have noticed that restore points help but do not allow for complete recovery of all the files and folders on my pc's so I needed to use a different strategy to accomplish my needs.

In my case, I came down on the side of "Windows Home Server" to provide the above mentioned services because the OS now costs under $100 and will run on an older re-purposed pc (I built mine from scratch but the the principle remains the same). Drives are cheap (I use 5 drives in my server) and the OS will mirror the data in the shared folders across multiple drives so I don't lose valuable pictures (I would hate to have to explain to my wife that I lost the pictures of our kids or grandchildren and can't get them back), software, or the pc backups that will be needed sooner or later. The home server even monitors if my pc's have been backed up regularly or need to be backed (and notifies me should one need to be backed up, the default backup schedule is daily or I can manually backup after I make changes) and it even cleans up the backups for me retaining however many I tell it (default I believe is 3-daily, 4-weekly, 3-monthly) so I don't have to be bothered with the administration. Now I only have to maintain the files I share in one location (even my music library) and I just point to the shared file on the server from 5 different computers and because the restore can be down to a single file or folder instead of only the complete system I have been able to turn off restore points on the individual pc's and use this space for other uses.

When I first started down this road I was just interested in simplifying the administration of sharing the same files across multiple systems and automating the backup process (because I am inherently lazy about it even though I know how important it is when you need to recover something...Hindsight is 20/20 afterall), but about 2 weeks after I stood up a Windows Home Server I had the bad fortune to suffer a hard drive crash on my laptop and discovered how well the restore function in WHS works. Just installed a new hard drive and then restored the last backup which took about 20 minutes and I was back in action with this laptop and all drivers, files, network connections, etc were there, no downloading to get them back or having to reapply patches or updates.

Anyway I was just wondering what solutions others are using and why.

For Premium/Basic users:

Drive Backup Express - Free Download!

Paragon will backup everything on the partitions you select, and create an exact mirror image.
then perform weekly file backup with Vista file backup utility. it is best to do these image/backups to an external. The initial file backups with be 25GB+, then it will backup weekly only the files that have changed since the last backup was performed, and create a new disk image every 6 months or so.

File backup will only backup your User data-not installed programs/windows components. the should be used in conjuction, after a restoration of Windows with the image, to restore all changed/updated User data to the current last file backup made.

Any programs (say you upgrade your antivirus/ dvd player/and all new Windows Updates since the image was made) will have to be re-installed. It is recommended to create a new image every 6 months to take program/update changes into account,thus keeping your image up to date.

For Other Vista users use Complete PC backup and restore Utility instead of Paragon.

This sounds like a really good solution at a really good price point. Do you know if it will play nice with a nas so as to allow multiple pc's to backup to the same drive? Would you install this product on each pc or on one master controler?

By the way WHS also does incremental backups of only what has changed and not full backups every time.

The file backups will backup by system name to an external, and files backup will be listed by date.
The image software will be installed on the pc's, and the image can be renamed.

you create a bootable recovery disk for the image to be restored off of.

I use acronis true image