One more important difference: The OneCare backup engine is not integrated with Vista's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). The result is that a backup of a file made with OneCare does not have a corresponding entry in the "Previous Versions" tab of a file's properties, which makes it more difficult to walk mom through restoring something over the phone.
So, for those of us who use OneCare on Vista: We're left with either using the OneCare backup, which lacks VSS integration, and the ability to back up to a second internal hard drive ... or using the built-in Vista backup, which has its own list of shortcomings: The most egregious of which is that it skips over many file types (even if they're stored in your "My Documents" folder), while providing no ability to change these selections! Also does not let you schedule Complete PC Backups without creative command-line tools + scheduler techniques.
I would strongly suggest to Microsoft that it fill the gaps in at least ONE of these two tools (ideally the one that doesn't require customers to pay an extra $40/yr), so that their customers are not forced to choose which crippled piece of software to "make do" with. And I continue to hope that when Windows 7 rolls around, functionality from the awesome “SyncToy” tool is integrated in to the OS, and that the "Complete PC Backup" functionality is expanded upon and given to users of home editions of Windows. Fortunately, MS is finally seeing some good competition to provide them with the incentive to do the right thing (think “Time Machine”).
On a related note, I think the pendulum swung a little _too_ far in the "simplicity" direction between XP and Vista on the user interfaces of several tools (notably Backup and Defrag). They're so simple and feature-less now, that they only serve to frustrate/annoy non-novice users. Over-all, I'm very happy with Vista and think it's a vast improvement over XP. But there's still room for improvement, and this is one example. I thought MS was in the business of making complex software (loaded with features), while striving to find balance with an intuitive UI. With some of the tools built in to Vista (again, notably Backup and Defrag), they seem to have abandoned that mentality, and just went the "lowest common denominator" route. I wonder if they think their customers don't notice?
Jim
