Frank_Rizzo - 3:30 pm on Dec 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

Forget restore points. They are a waste of time.

Use a quality drive image program which copies partitions onto image files. These are much easier to maintain and archive.

Something like Macrium will do. It can image disks or drive (letters), compress the data, split into 4gb file sizes, perform full, incremental or differential backups and schedule the tasks. The backups happen on the fly so you don't need to shutdown your PC or stop working on things.

There is a free version and paid version. Both will do much better than windows own system restore point feature. Once you use disk imaging you can turn off system restore which will a) recover disk space, b) speed up your PC in some areas.