Windows provides a fail safe way of recovering your entire hard drive with system images, but what if you only need to recover certain files from the image instead of restoring your entire hard drive?
Windows Vista and 7 have a few different options for recovering your computer in case of a catastrophe. System protection will allow you to keep a restore point and backup to an existing known good state, and a system image will allow you to reproduce every bit on your hard drive in case of total failure. A system image is more completed but there is no easy way to recover a single file from a system image.