I use Ghost and backup. Unless you want to do an image once a week (depending on how big your partition is and how fast your storage is) it will take from 20 minutes to a couple of hours (such as a network share). So if you make an image of your partitions then only make another image when you make a major change such as installing software that is a pain to configure or you have done major modifications to the system since the last image was made.
Then using a backup program or batch files back up your data.
I put XP 64 on my system becasue I am buying a Qaud that will be here on Monday or Tuesday. To bad, most of my programs will not work with XP 64. So I put the XP image back on the system. Have to give it some thought, will XP 32 support 4 processors? (I never had a four processor system that I could install XP on before, just servers and the owning department would have been quite upset if I loaded XP on one just to see if it would work).
So after two hours of fiddeling around with XP 64 I put the XP 32 image back on my system, it said 'Hi! nice to be back, what do you want to do today?'
Ya, Ghost and backups have pulled my Senior a** out of some bad situations over the years since it first came out.
HTH
