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>I've gotten in the habit of making image backups of my drives on a regular basis; there are a number of solutions (Ghost, ImageCast, TapeDisk, Universal Drive Copy) that will make sector by sector image backups either to a file, or to tape devices (at least SCSI devices that are accessible with ASPI drivers), will back up any and all operating systems, and can restore them to the same or new media from a DOS-based boot floppy. If you're using SCSI tape backup (I use DAT) UDC at under $100 from CSC (www.corpsys.com) is the least-cost solution; it also supports other media, and does a decent job of copying CDs if you have a CD-R or CD-R/W. TapeDisk turns you SCSI tape drive into a DASD, addressible as another disk drive, and offers a ton of functionaility. Ghost is widely available, and does a great job (we use it to create standard system setups to install on turnkey systems for Win95/98; while it images NT partitions, it doesn't handle fixing SIDs, so using it to clone NT systems
>for network environments is a problem, requiring some extra work); ImageCast does much the same thing, but offers push-based multicasting of systems for large-scale production, and has a SID handler, but it's expensive. Both Ghost and ImageCast require separate drivers to use tape devices for imaging.
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>A number of backup programs are offering single-floppy restore options at this time; Win98's backup handles Win98 systems nicely, and both BackupExec (now a Seagate product, sold as Seagate Backup) and CA-ArcServe (formerly Cheyenne, now owned by CA) both offer the single-floppy recovery utility now.

Yea, I use a ditto max 7 gig tape backup and had reliable backup. I was just impressed by the S.M.A.R.T. technology which monitors a drive and reports when you need to replace it - before it really goes down. The drive wasn't cooked, it just wouldn't boot. Once I put the new drive in and set it to master with the old one as slave, I was able to copy everything from disk to disk, reboot and was back to work. If I'd had to go the tape route, it would have taken 1 - 2 hours.