Ghost Drive Imaging is for those of us that like to "tinker/experiment" alot.
It allows one to take a "picture" of your hard drive setup including operating system, applications, and anything software related, save it to another hard drive, and have it available to bring back over in the event of a system failure.
Product info:
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
Recommended steps before using it:
Get a second hard drive perferably large and install it (Those 250gig drives are nice)
Install a fresh copy of the Operating System
Install all "can't live without" applications
Setup all personal settings such as email accounts
Move your "My Documents" folder to be stored on the second hard drive. "Right click My Documents on the start menu to be able to do so..."
You would boot your computer with the ghost boot disk and select the option to copy the image of your first hard drive to your second hard drive.
Once completed you would simply remove the boot cd and use your pc like normal.
Now say for instance your operating system becomes corrupt.
Simply boot with that Ghost Boot CD again but this time tell it to apply the image that you saved to the first hard drive.
This places you right back to where you were when you made the image.
Symantec has improved their product considerably and now even offer scheduled backups so check their info out for all your options.