A quick search seems to indicate that Vista backup is very similar to Win7 backup. Win7 backup is one of the few things MS has ever done right, IMNSHO. I only use Win7 backup currently (though if I was backing up Win8 I would probably use Macrium).
It is always wise to have a clean, bare image of just the OS and drivers needed for your computer, so that if TSHTF, you can rebuild off a clean install. It's nice to have an OS all tweaked the way you like it, but eventually all that tweaking and running the OS for a long time slows things down and injects variables that can potentially cause problems and be a bear to diagnose, making a nuke and clean reinstall the best option.
This is just how I do it, but I have several different reimage options available. It may be overkill, but disk space is cheap and I like options. On the new Lenovo I recently got, I set it up like this:
1) Turn on machine and let it do all the bootup stuff new machines like to do. Once I'm past the login screen, I disconnect the network before it can start downloading every freakin' update in the universe.
2) Make a factory recovery disk. In this case I made a 16gb flash drive my factory recovery disk.
3) Create an initial Win7 backup of the bare OS in its newly booted state (sort of the same as step 2, but using Win backup).
4) Plug back into the network and let Win7 get all the critical MS updates it needs to get. Make another disk image.
5) Install all my software, make GUI tweaks I like to make, move data onto drive. Let updates run again. Make another Win7 backup.
6) Setup weekly backups and forget about them till I need one.
This gives me several options. If I did something stupid, like install a prg that screws stuff up, I can just reimage with the previous week's backup with minimal data loss. If that doesn't work, I can go back to the image in step 5. If things are still screwed up, I can go back tp one of the "barebones" images I had to rebuild the system.
