This may or may not be helpful at this particular time, but it's worth considering...

Symantec produce a fairly inexpensive software package called 'Norton Ghost' which, amongst other things, is an excellent backup tool...

It can make an 'image file' of the entire hard drive on CDRoms, which can subsequently be used to restore the machine to the exact state it was in at the time of the backup - even if you need to replace the drive. The number of CDs required depends on how much stuff is on the drive; Ghost typically squeezes 1Gb on to a 700Mb CDRom using data compression.

Even better, though, is you can 'clone' one drive from another - I use it to upgrade machines to bigger drives, as you can specify the size of the destination partition. When the old drive is replaced with the new cloned drive the machine will be configured exactly as before but with more free disk space. To do this requires a certain amount of 'hardware knowledge', though.

It's one of the few software packages that does exactly what it says on the box!