In the past, we only had to worry about backing up our important work and personal data. As we download much of our music to our PC, and there’s often no way of re-downloading purchased media files back to your computer, backing up your audio/video files is probably as paramount as your other files.

The answer is to use a tool that will enable you to backup either your entire drive or drive partition and, then if you have issues in the future, you can simply restore the entire drive back to your computer. Ideal for quickly restoring a system partition.

O&O Disk Image Express Edition is a very simple drive backup and restore tool that will enable you to backup your drive and, if you experience problems in the future, restore when necessary. However, it’s limited. It’s a very basic version of the Professional edition. For example, there are no drive recovery tools or facility to boot in to a restore CD so you can restore a previously backed up system drive – so it’s no good for backing up your Windows partition.

You can backup incrementally if you only want to backup a drive or partition you've backed up previously. This means that each new backup will store only new and updated files, meaning that it shouldn't take too long to complete. This is ideal for backing up, say, a media partition where you add new audio files each week.

There is a Professional version of this software that enables you to backup and restore your system partition and much more.