Bare-Metal Restore
Complete disaster recovery (restore from bare metal; formatting and restoring) has been a thorn since Windows XP.
There are there different types of backup:
You can take a copy off-site and yeah, it’s slow, but a 4mm tape fits nicely in a safe deposit box or neighbors’ drawer and hard drives (and the bays to keep them in) were expensive. Since hard drives got very cheap it’s time to explore other easier and faster options.
Look around and you’ll find a bunch of promising disk backup possibilities and I settle on a test of Symantec’s Ghost, Acronis True Image and Image for Windows.
Basically all of these guys allow you to create a disk image on another drive or CD/DVD and, in the event of a disaster, boot from their CD-ROM and restore.
Starting out using a big box for testing, I need six RAID drives using a Perc controller (neither using RAID-0 or RAID-5), 2 3Ghz processors and Windows XP.