Article about new windows drive imaging technology from ms

[mouser]

This is really interesting and touches on some drive imaging issues raised in the past.

http://www.apcstart.com/site/jbannan/2006/07/759/build-your-own-vista-install-dvd

The bottom is about to fall out of the market for imaging tools like Symantec Ghost: Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft’s own system imaging technology. The Vista install DVD is, in fact, just one big system image.

and:

However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft’s Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn’t a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.

and something i have been wanting for a while:

Being file-based also enables certain features which will prove seriously useful. When capturing a system to a WIM file you can specify exclusions. For example, you can have a work directory on the system with temporary data. Instead of having to clean it up every time you can simply exclude it from the capture. The same applies to session-based files like the pagefile – it will be recreated when the system boots anyway, so why waste space?

and

Single-instance files are another advancement. WIM files can store more than one image, so you can have multiple system configurations stored within the one WIM, but to avoid image bloat single instancing checks each file referenced in each image. When more than one image references the same file (for example, almost the entire contents of the C:\Windows directory), the physical file is only stored once within the WIM and every image which references it is directed to that copy.

[Rover]

Wow, this imaging system sounds really revolutionary! 

Until you realize that Novell has been doing this for years (at least 4) with Zen for Desktops Imaging. 

[f0dder]

Nothign revolutionary, really - they're basically just making an archive file instead of a "real" image.

This means it'll be slower (creating a lot of new files is a lot slower than simply writing sectors) and (unless they apply RAR-style "solid compression") have bigger images than sector-based copies.