And if you want an exact image copy of a hard drive or one of it's partitions, Norton's Ghost is popular. Norton also sells "Partition Magic" that allows you to partition any hard drive any time.

Here is what I do. I have a simple program called second copy. I have directed it to copy all my important files from my C drive to my D drive into a folder named "C Backups" and from my D drive onto my C drive into a folder named "D" Backups. It will either sync the files or just append new depending on how I set it. Important files I have it check and back up every few hours. Some others only once a week. One a month I copy the backups to an external hard drive and once every three months I back up a set to DVD and put them in a safe deposit box. That is an outline of what I do and to be honest I don't have a desire to go any further. I think I am pretty well covered. Never happy about any data loss but I fell I have minimized it. If you want to read about Second Copy go here - http://www.centered.com/ Good luck with your project.