Back up Drives

gustabo
I use Acronis to back up to an external WD 3tb drive.
If I ever find myself in a position where my c drive won't boot at all, I stick an acronis recovery cd in my cd/dvd drive, boot to it, select the backup file that I want to restore, restore it and I'm back to where I was when I backed up to that backup file.
I setup up a rotation of three backups of my c drive, two each of my d and two each of my sample drive so all my drives are constantly backed up.
I typically back up my c drive daily, and my d and sample drive when I deem it necessary because of changes to the contents to those drives.
I have had to restore my c drive on occasions in the past and the restore worked fast and flawlessly.
I also have acronis set to verify the backup image when it backs up just for piece of mind.
Remember, you can only do a restore to the last time you backed up so if you backup up only once a month, let's say on the first and you suffer a bad crash on the 31st, you can only restore the last backup you ran on the first and you lost a month's work...

Cactus Music
One suggestion..  I would never keep any important Data on a C drive. Store all Data on your other drives. If any drive might need a re install its going to be the C drive. If your data is on a second drive it won't be effected by the install. FOr some reason I've never had a Data drive fail on me, but I've had a few C drives go. Might be that the data drives see less stress.
If you have a tower desktop with 3 drives it's easy to have at least 2 copies stored,, but what it the power supply goes nuts and fries the works,, so therefore an external as well, and even off site. 
Any external drive will give you backup. Some will do this automatically but I prefer good old drag and drop or a "save as" before I shut down each day. The automatic backup software drives are spooky if you hook them to a second computer.