Five free system restore tools

If your computer suffers a major catastrophe, your best insurance against a heart attack is having previously backed up all your essential data. Even better, if you have backed up your entire disk. That's a lot easier to say than to do, of course. But Lifehacker offers five free tools to help you avoid disaster. I recently bought a 160Gb external hard drive for $100, specifically for back-ups. I figured it was a lot cheaper than paying a computer company 2-3 times that amount or more to recover my data in the face of a meltdown. So far I have been doing the back-ups manually, so now it's time to get down and learn how to actually use an appropriate back-up software package.