Time flies by. I still remember when 40 MB HDD storage was considered BIG.

Well, after a recent mess with our corporate Exchange server syncing back an almost empty Outlook data file to my various connected devices and thus wiped out all my contacts (2.000+ fully qualified private and business contacts from more than a decade of networking...) I decided to peruse my options and finally added a Freecom Network Drive with a capacity of 1 TB. (I could not find the 1 TB version on the international Freecom site, so the previous link points to the German version.) Over the course of the last years I've become a huge fan of most of Freecom's external disk products.

Installing the drive worked like a charm. NTFS formatting 1 TB takes a looooooooong while but finally, everything is just fine.

Acronis True Image Echo Workstation 11 from now on does permanent incremental backup images of all of my Windows Vista Ultimate drives. So far I can only say good about the product. It works silently in the background and gives me exactly the options I like:

1. Restoring an image (equals a bit-by-bit copy) of my current running system or any previous version to the same hardware.

2. Restoring the image back to a totally different hardware.

3. Selectively restoring files back to wherever I want.

4. All of the above with full versioning support.

There must have been a reason why the solution is a 2008 Community Choice Award Winner by Windows IT PRO.