How to backup your system(s) depends upon several things; importance of the data, amount of data, accessability (time to recover) of backups, amount of technical involvement you desire, how many systems you backup, and often what your friends or associates are doing.
Backups do evolve. Advances in software and hardware, as well as the amount of data, usually cause changes in the way you backup.
All that being said, I started off with a simple copy directories from one hard disk onto another hard disk all in the same system. I briefly used tape and found it totally unacceptable. Either too slow, limited capacity, or too expensive. Too manys toos...
Then we (I) built a home network. It grew to six computers, sometimes more, sometimes less, and I started copying files between computers. 100bT was fine. I had two RAID-5's with 1TB of total storage. I was backed up and my backups were backed up...
Then I worked at VERITAS and got a copy of Backup Exec. Did a great job, automated and very complete. Easy to use to. Did backups from a Peer-to-Peer ''Server'' of all of the other systems. No muss, no fuss. Did disk to disk, still not a tape fan.
VERITAS spent a bunch of money purchasing a company to add ''bare metal restore'' to it's flagship ''Netbackup'' line. BMR is the ability to restore a system disk with only a new disk and your last backup. No need to reload the server software (or keep track of all of the patches, licenses, and new applications with licences added, ''where did I put that distribution...''), that would add time and introduce the possibility of configuration errors - AKA failure to restore. Backup Exec, what I was using, didn't have BMR...
One day I found PowerQuest Drive Image (now it belongs to Symantec and replaces Ghost AND Symantec and VERITAS have merged). The price was right, and the capabilities were what I wanted.
So today, my Peer-to-Peer Server has hardware RAID-1 system and data disks. Drives are cheap. I added a Ximeta 200GB NAS drive to the network. All of the satellite systems backup to the NAS device, it appears as a local drive to each of them. After Backup I create a copy of the backup on the RAID-1 on the ''server''. I create directories with the backup date and system. That allows easy indexing. The Power Quest Drive Image has a restore interface that works much like Windows File Explorer. You can restore an entire drive, or a directory, or a file. And any of them to an alternate location. If it's really important I squirt a directory to a CD or DVD too.
Haven't checked out the Ghost version of the PowerQuest Drive Image yet. Hope it's all intact. Another function lets you copy system drive to new (larger!) target drive to enable moving to a larger system drive. It works very well. Just remember to mark the partition as active with Disk Manager. Works well with Win2K and XP too.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean something can't go wrong...