Dear Diary, Drive image solutions generally will take a carbon copy image of automatic door opener your drives and preserve it for you. This is beneficial for you to have in the event you do experience a major data loss, as it serves to make it faster and easier for you to restore your entire system. However, these solutions fall short in that they don't provide you with the ability to really specify which files and folders to save. Rather, they take a big snapshot of the drives. Backup solutions, on the other hand, work in almost the opposite way, taking a snapshot of your files and folders. These solutions allow you to specify which files and folders to save, restore, and so forth. So as you can see, you really need to be using both of these solutions together rather than trying to decide which one of the two to use. The good news for those on a budget is that you can often find free downloads for both drive image and backup solutions on the Internet. This essentially means that you can make your data save events more effective, and you can restore either your entire system or parts of your system with ease if and when the need arises. So take time today to explore the various options available to you and work to implement these two types of solutions together.