Several comments got in while I was composting, but I'll post it anyway.

Last question first:

If your hard drive fails, in many cases all partitions are unreadable, so a backup on a different partition of the same mechanical device is not really a safe backup.

It is possible to have damage to individual parts of the disk surface where the files are recorded, so that only parts of the information are lost. In this case other parts of the drive may remain usable for a while, so you may be able to read from a backup on the other partition; but any significant file corruption is usually a sign that the entire drive will cease to function in the very near future.

Since you may have time to copy everything from the image in a different partition to a new drive, it's better than no backup at all; but (1) you have to recognize that the drive is failing, (2) it has to be a failure that permits you to continue reading reliably from the other partition, and (3) you have to make the transfer of information before the entire drive tanks itself.

What is an image?

An image file is a "logically exact" copy of the one drive on another drive. This means that exactly the same information is copied from one drive to exactly the same "logical location" on another drive. The same "logical location" means that a cluster of data on one drive will have the same cluster address in the two copies of the data. Since two different drives may use different "addressing schemes" they need not be "mechanically identical," but if the computer asks for data from a specific cluster number, it should get identically the same information from either drive.

In actual practice, it is not necessary to control the "cluster address" of all the files to have a workable image; but location of some files is significant. When you do a defrag, your "details" picture will show a number of files as "unmovable." These are most of the ones that need to have specific locations.

In addition to the files you can "see" on a drive there are two copies of a File Allocation Table that tell where all the stuff is on the drive, and a Boot Sector that contains the information necessary to start the drive, tell the system how to read the drive, and tell the system where to find the first file it should read in order to get started. These must also be copied to the image, and they're the ones that you can't generally get with simple copy procedures.

Are my files being automatically backed up?

Probably NO. I haven't seen a recent copy of Ghost, and it may have added the ability to create a mirror and then do scheduled backups; but I'd expect that you have to turn it on and make the initial image as a specific user controlled precedure. Since the "unmovable" files are (nearly) all part of the operating system, once you've made a System Image, any new files can be added incrementally without worrying about cluster locations. Since the File Allocation Tables must change when new files are added, and/or when you do a defrag, they may need to be "restored" periodically to keep the image up to date.

If you want the backup to contain work files that you add, you also would need to set up a schedule and tell your system when to add any "new" files to the backup.

You could simply make a "new image" periodically, but even 20 or 30GB of stuff will take an hour or more just to copy everything from one drive to another.

We do have several people here who have said that they use Ghost on a regular basis. One of them can probably give you more specific information about how to use the program.

If you have an image of your hard drive on a different hard drive, you should be able to take the original hard drive out of your computer, and put the new one in in its place. The computer should not visibly recognize that the drives have been changed.

A backup drive should have all of the same files as the original, but will not necessarily run as a replacement if you swap drives.

John