"Easily"? Any link? As far as I know imagex.exe has less functionality than the "backup and restore" application, former being a simpler command line utility (1). Specifically, how would anybody without any programming experience (step by step)

- perform the regular backup in order to be prepared for the case his hard disk "dies."

- restore from his backup once the new hard disk is inserted in the computer. As far as I know, especially the repartitioning steps are far from being trivial and not done by imagex.

"Backup and restore" are GUI based tools, easy to be explained and used by non-professionals to do the full local backups of their computers. The same thing we can still do with iPhone and iTunes (a button in iTunes starting the complete backup of the iPhone, and restoring simply with the another button). Why should I purchase the third party program or do unknown amount of programming to do something like that on a Windows computer?

1) https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc749003%28v=WS....