There are 2 ways that I backup my main computer. I have a second spacious drive. That makes it easy to do a perfect backup in one of 2 ways:
1. I have an old emergency Ghost 2003 bootable emergency CD/diskette. When it is time for the weekly backup (to back up the entire disk that includes the operating system and files), I simply restart the computer with either the diskette or CD and have it backup the C drive to a specific folder as image files on the D drive.
2. If you have either at least one Seagate or Maxtor drive, then you can download free of charge software from Seagate's site(they own Maxtor now). Using that software you can burn an emergency bootable CD. Like in step one, you can boot off of it and save the entire C drive into the D drive as one image file. You can also a sector by sector backup, but this is not necessary.
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In both steps, if the main hard disk fails, you easily reboot with any of the emergency CDs after replacing the C drive hardware with a new drive. Within one hour, the main drive is completely restored and you do not have to configure anything. I have had this happen last year and step 1 CD made the restore simple.