[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Go with the slave drive scenario and install Norton Ghost or some other cloning software. There are some freeware ones but Ghost is the Best.
Norton Ghost allows you to take snapshots (images) and clones (duplicates).
Use this second hard drive (A NEW one) to store snaps and clones of your hard drive. This way, to recover your entire C:\drive in case of disaster, you need only replace the dead drive and then send a duplicate or your latest image to the new drive and you are back up and running just as if nothing ever happened.

I used to use an external USB drive to take full and incremental backups of my C:\drive using Dantz (EMC) Retrospect. It was good but it was clunky and took too much time to run a full backup even with USB 2.0.
This new system I use takes less time and negates the need for having to reinstall Windows as a first step to Disaster Recovery. I still do a once-per-month external backup as I used to but for day to day DR purposes I takes snaps each evening.

Give it some though. Tape is dead and CDs are too small. Even DVDs are too small if you have lots of data to backup like I do.

[holymoly]

Not a bad idea.

Currently I need to back up about 4 gigs of data (patches, software I've collected over the years, etc.), in preparation for (eventually) replacing this system. For that, I'm still leaning towards a CD-R or DVD/RW drive.