Dennis O’Reilly has a write upcomparing the built-in disk imager of windows 7 to a free 3rd party tool: Easeus Todo Backup

The write-up is thorough and the Easus Todo Backup product comes out on top, mainly because it is faster and it uses a nifty wizard to guide the end user through the process.

Disk Imaging is likely to become a pretty hot topic in the coming months, as various companies implement the API from Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, which supports leveraging Volume Shadow Copies to create disk images.  Managed backup service provider The Backup Plan (sponsor of this site) is even in on the game, offering full offsite backup of images in Vista and windows 7 and Server 2008.

Disk Imaging is important because it allows full point-in-time recovery of a partition.  This is often known as bare-metal restore, and saves recovery time because the machine can be deployed exactly as it was at the time of the image, so all programs are installed, computer identity is intact, etc.