It depends on what you want to back up, and how comfortable you are recovering your own system. It also depends on if you are sure you can keep the same hardware, becuase the drivers will come into play, or if you are looking for the critical stuff, and if the coputer is a melty pile of goo at the bottom of a lake in Oz and you are putting your data on new hardware.

My personal favorite for a personal machine is RAID 1, which is a second, clone drive in your machine. Especially if you put it in an exeternally accessable, removable carriage. Pull out the back up drive, and put it in, and you are up and running with a few minutes screw driver time if you main drive sizzles. And most mobos support it these days out the box. Downside is, it takes a little bit of homework to set it up, and if youa ren't comfortable opening your box, don't do it. It also reduces the number of internal harddrives you can support, effectively by half.

Similar to that, you can get a second hard drive, and some kind of stand alone partition manager (Partition Magic is always useful). When you feel the need, stick the second drive on an IDE or SATA cable, and boot into your partiion manager. Tell it to clone A to B. Take B out, put it in a safe place. Almost as good as RAIDing, but it won't be as up to date.

The next option is something called Ghost. It's from Norton, and it makes a compressed image of your drive, which you can then move onto something like one of the big (multi-gig) flash modules on the market. Pricey, and Ghost sometimes has the rep for beating the snot out of your drive physically, not so good for long service life. This will let you move your machine's "mind and soul" to another body, and once you've tracked down all the drivers for the new hardware (if any), all back like you left it. I like this if you have a lot of machines with a common configuration, but for most people, I'm going to hold my yahs and neas.

The other option is a basic back up of your data files. This is what I recommend for most people. Burn the data files you want to keep, along with your email and bookmarks and everything else you can't live without. (Me and my umpty-thousand fonts.) Put those and your install disks for your applications in a safe place. That way, you can reinstall your apps, then reload your datafiles. Not the most elegant of the three, but the cheapest, and the least frightening for many computer users.

I don't like Microsoft's backup utility. I tell everyone, turn it off, and keep it off. The reason why is, ifyour computer catches something, you just backed up the virus, to. All of these options have that problem, but this one is such that the virus will just reinfect your machine as soon as the wipe is done. <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" /> It also has a failure rate which is much higher than I consider acceptable.