What kills me about Windows Backup is that they introduced a good "disk image" backup solution in Windows 7 and they're deprecating it!
The current backup is basically just user data, and is not guaranteed to capture all of it.
The old backup protects 100% of the disk, even including recovery partitions and other special volumes.
Oh, and it produces a VHDX file that is directly bootable, either on bare metal or as a virtual machine.
I've used the disk image to recover entire machines in minutes and get back to work. I back up to an external SSD and if the main work machine dies, I just plug the SSD into another machine and use Hyper-V to boot it. I can be back up and running 100x faster than it would have taken to copy the files back.
Oh, and of course, you can take a snapshot before you start up the backup image so that you won't accidentally corrupt a known-good backup!
The current backup is basically just user data, and is not guaranteed to capture all of it.
The old backup protects 100% of the disk, even including recovery partitions and other special volumes.
Oh, and it produces a VHDX file that is directly bootable, either on bare metal or as a virtual machine.
I've used the disk image to recover entire machines in minutes and get back to work. I back up to an external SSD and if the main work machine dies, I just plug the SSD into another machine and use Hyper-V to boot it. I can be back up and running 100x faster than it would have taken to copy the files back.
Oh, and of course, you can take a snapshot before you start up the backup image so that you won't accidentally corrupt a known-good backup!