I'm going to be installing my new HD today and after about 40 reformats, new HD's and such, this time im getting very serious about backing up our data as the last reformat we lost a few pictures that were important. I was looking at data back up software from best buy first and this one caught my eye: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8394962&type=product&tab=1&id=1179876490101. I also just stumbled upon one from this site: http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4110-grbackpro.html.

I've never really used any backup software before and I am not sure if one of these two would be a good and reliable option? If anyone has a good amount of experiance with this kind of software and knows of these two or any other brands that work good, input would be greatly appreciated. I'm tired of the long process of recovering data through Knoppix and restoring later after a failure and losing some data in the process. Thanks for the help.

consider file replication as an alternative; new or modified files can be replicated
to a secondary device and then relocated to a new system or back to whence the came.

see this post for sync software

the nice part of sync to secondary media is the device can be mounted to some
other system (Eg; Mac, Linux) and put into use there

Good back up software is Acronis True Image.It's very reliable and easy to use program with a friendly and simple interface like Windows XP.
www.acronis.com

Check out Cobian Backup.

It is very good and free.

www.cobian.se

Depends on what you are backing up and for how long you need it backed up.

I advise all my customer who depend on their comp for work or school (i.e. university/college) to use an image backup utility. A "disk image" is an exact copy of the entire contents of the hard drive. It's EVERYTHING!! In the even of a catastrophic event, i.e. corrupt installation and cannot boot, you just restore from your last image and PRESTO!! You're back and running!! Plus it's FAST!! It can take only a few minutes if you store the image on a hard drive partition or 20- 40 minutes if you store on an external HD. Plus, the images double as a file backup because the file system is preserved and the utility can retrieve individual files.

Now, if you're backing up personal files such as family photos and videos, then use DVD-Rs and any file backup utility will do. I recommend NTbackup that comes with WinXP. Once you write a file to a DVD-R, it can't be overwritten. Plus, DVD-Rs don't degrade over time. The only way you can lose the file is if you lose the DVD (or melt it!)

I 2nd that.. Using Aacronis you can do a complete backup of your drive to an alternate device such as dvd or external hard drive, then do periodic incremental or differential backups . This will allow you do a "bare metal" restore with the latest data.

I use goback, and windows XP backup (to a second HD) all the time.