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I have to admit, what I, as a consumer, would really love, would be a backup system that was intelligent enough to do the following: Reinstall the base operating system and applications as installed. Maintain a constant archive of digital photos and created documents. And be able to restore both sets onto a computer in less than an hour, permitting me to flush the system on a semi-regular basis.

Instead, what I'm offered is a series of backup systems that back up everything, and if I want to restore, it'll put me right back to the point that caused the need for the restore in the first place, with no intelligence in file or data selection.

I know as a user that the answer's pretty simple, make sure that I do this myself, putting photos, videos and documents in a specific folder chain, backing that up regularly, and create a drive image after installing all needed software on a vanilla system. The problem is that the time I'm least willing and most time impacted is after spending hours and hours installing the operating system and applications.

I can have a vague hope that Seagate has finally addressed this pressing need in the market, but I suspect, from the press release, that once again, they've simply made a new variation of whole system mirroring, resulting in hours long restore processes that simply put the system back to the point it was unstable.

Sounds like what you really want is a unix system. User information is automatically separated from system data and programs. When I backup my boxes at home, all I do is rsync /home to the external backup device. Because my /home partition is on it's own drive, I can do a complete reload of my box when I do an OS upgrade, yet still maintain all of my user preferences and data without even having to restore anything. The 'time machine' program on a Mac also does an excellent job of preserving user data history.

Where you run into problems, is the registry on windows boxes, where system and user data is commingled such that restoring one or the other separately is difficult, if not impossible.

I’m sure you know Ghost will do most of what you want. Install your O/S and all your base applications on partition C of 500gb hard drive Then make a Ghost image which will reinstall all this in ten minutes. Lets say partition C is 25-50 gigabytes

Partition D is what remains on your 50gb hard drive and is where you keep photos and documents. As far as backing up your images, photos and documents why won’t an external hard drive do it to your satisfaction?