I bought a copy of Norton Ghost after buying a USB hard drive. I threw away the software that came bundled with the USB drive.

Ghost seems to work fine. Lots of options, including network backups, full backups, drive image, incremental backups and booting from a cd to restore from a backup, automatic scheduling and all that stuff.

There's lots of different ways to skin this cat. I'm not sure there's one overall winner for everybody, only winners for your individual setup and situation.

-David

I've been using Acronis Trueimage for some time now, I'm very happy with it as it's able to make images of my drive, even with open or used files.

I have one image of a clean and shining new PC so I can restore that every 6 months when I mess things up too much to use :D