[DopeWeasel]

Here at DeVry University we use Norton Ghost to back up and create drive images of all the faculty and lab computers. It's simple, can be ran accross a network, it's relativly cheap and reliable. We store all of our backups on one of our servers that has a mirrored RAID array. If somthing goes wrong we can wipe and reload a machine (or multiple machines, around 6-8 max because of network throughput) in an hour or less.

I use a newer version of Ghost at home that works great, creates incremental backups for me on a second partition whenever I schedule them. I have 4 partitions on my home pc; C: Windows, D: Programs, E: Temp and Music, and F:Backup(a compressed drive). If my Windows partition gets corrupted I can simply run Ghost and restore it with all my programs on the D drive still intact.

Microsoft is promissing some other form of backup to be announced with the next version of windows (Longhorn) that is supposed to make this process easier, but I don't know all the details.

edit: BTW, to answer your questions, yes... all can be fixed with Ghost. To run a re-image with ghost you boot from either the Ghost CD or a Ghost floppy. You can choose wherever you want for your backup location. I'm honestly not sure if the newest versions of Ghost support external USB drives, but I'm told that they do.