YOu cannot do images of drives with Smartware, which is a filed based backup solution.
I used Acronis True Image. You can backup and validate your backups using ATI from Windows, but you cannot restore them from the NAS. I cannot explain why, but ATI deems the image corrupted when you restore, and the restore abort. As you know, it is highly recommended to start a restore from the Acronis recovery CD. If a restore fails when it started from Windows, your computer will be left in an unstable boot state (been there, done that).
To work around the issue, you have to copy the image to a USB disk, and then restore from the USB disk. A way to do that is to use Safepoints to backup to a USB disk the content of the NAS. This is what I was doing and it worked great.
