Having found Windows Backup and other backup software absolutely useless when it came to needing them - apart from being too complicated and always at risk of missing something vital, I decided to try The Integral SATA HDD Copy Station.
Bought an extra, identical drive for my laptop and then, after having reached nirvana on the install and update front, whipped the drive out of the laptop and popped it into the Copy Station, together with the identical drive. The copy was surprisingly fast - I expected it to take all night, but, using the eSATA/eSATA cable provided, it was completed in an hour or so. Popped the cloned drive into the laptop (to prove cloning had worked properly) and found it worked exactly the same as the one I'd cloned. It's a bit-for-bit copy so it's identical to the original, data-wise.
I put the original (source) HDD in a very safe place, ready in case I need it. Everything's been brilliant and I will be repeating the process at periodic intervals (say 3 times a year), so that I have recent updates.
If you are confident about taking the HDD out of your machine (desktop or laptop) without zapping the circuitry, the cost of this Copy Station and a duplicate HDD is well worth the money compared to having to do a complete reinstall following a hard drive failure. I also recommend buying one of those HDD eSATA enclosures (you can get them for under a tenner), not only to protect the cloned HDD but, if necessary, be up and running in a few minutes - critical for a one-man business. Just ordered another, faster HDD, so that I can rotate backups.
Note - This is not a recommended method for backing up personal files and data (although it does that at the same time), which should be done routinely to an external device (USB stick or HDD) - it's a great way to avoid an awful lot of pain if the HDD fails - and they do, very occasionally, but always at the worst moments.
Summary - a great product from a respected company, at a very reasonable price - and their instructions make it so easy to use.