Christine Fok: Vista SP1 Backup & Restore contains many updates that improve reliability. Great effort has been put into improving the overall quality of File Backup, Complete PC Backup and System Restore.

Many of those important changes may not be visible to users, but if you run Backup and Restore tools, you can see some functionality improvements that many users had asked for:

Backing-up EFS files
File Backup now backs up EFS (Encrypting File System) encrypted files. For those concerned with security, the encryption on those files are kept throughout the process. So don’t worry, you won’t compromise your document’s security by using our Vista SP1 backup tool.

Restoring Complete PC to a new motherboard
With SP1, you can use Complete PC Restore to a new motherboard that uses previously absent disk controller. That means, if the new hardware requires an inbox driver that was previously disabled when the Complete PC backup was taken, the required critical driver will be enabled in the last stage of the restore to ensure the machine will be bootable.

OTS credentials for scheduling Backup
In Vista (pre-SP1), only someone logged in as administrator could configure backup. Now, it’s possible for standard users to configure a backup. When scheduling a backup, standard users will be asked to supply administrator credentials. That is what we call over-the-shoulder (OTS) credentials. That is because… well, if the user doesn’t know the credentials, the administrator usually type it over the user’s shoulder :-)