A backup is usually for documents, pictures, movies, music files and so on.Most people assume that a backup will back up their programs and that could not be further from the truth. Backups do not back up your programs. If you are concerned about your programs, you should create an image of your hard drive.  An image of a hard drive is a basically carbon copy of your hard drive that is stored for later recovery. However, keep in mind, that the image is only will restore it to the point where you created it. If you created image on 01/01/2009 and you have added programs to your hard drive,  and let’s say you have a crash on 01/01/2010 you will only recover up to the point and date of your last image creation. Backups should be done each time you create or add new files (pictures, music, movies and so on)there are many backup programs available, that will assist you in doing different of backups (incremental or full back ups) Incremental backups back up only recently created files, full backup backs up everything and usually takes much longer. Feel free give us a call, we will be more than happy to discuss with you what method will work best for you .