If you are interested in buying a product to make a copy of your whole hard drive to restore in the event of failure, DriveImage is $69.95, [url]http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/[/url]. Norton Ghost is another fine product. If you want to make incremental backups of your Data you will want to go with a 'Backup' software. The Dantz product looks fine, from their website. I can go into more detail on options if you wish. Lemme know.
As reference, I have an image of my system drive(c:) on another hard drive in the pc (e:). I will loose stuff that I save since the last image. I usually re-image every few months. Again, this is the System files, important data should be backed up as often as you don't want to spend regenerating the data.
Hope this helps.
ByteTheBullet (-: