Now that we have DVDs and very high capacity hard drives, the sensible backup route would seem to be Drive Imaging. I am currently looking at a 15 day evaluation trial of Acronis True Image (current BLICKY), which has had a couple of good write-ups which reckon it is currently more reliable or versatile than the opposition.
I've not had time to do much playing about with it yet, but it does seem user friendly.
It runs initially via Windows, but if your hard drive is trashed you can restore things via it's own CD-Booting disc.
It's big claim is that it makes an image of Everything on the hard drive at the moment you run the programme, including all the files belonging to the Windows Operating System which standard backup programmes tell you they cannot back-up because a programme is running.
You can back up a complete hard drive or any partitions individually. You can then save the resulting image file on a different partition (or external drive), or it will automatically split it into chunks and burn it directly onto a series of CDs or to DVD. Once you have a full image, you can then do incremental images which add recent changes to the backup set you have already made.
Once you have the image this one lets you "Mount" it as a "virtual" drive, so you can browse through it using a standard file manager and copy or retrieve individual files as if they were on a standard (read only) drive.

I'll report back when I have had a better chance to try it out.
Quack!
Geoff the Duck.