Recovery/backup program suggestions.

After my recent disaster that reacquired a reinstall of Widows by using some recovery disks that were made with Symantec Ghost I am going to get my machines ready for just such a disaster. It was quite easy to reinstall with the recovery disks problem is that it wasn't my machine and the disks came with the machine when it was purchased so they put the machine back to that state. If the machine had a recent recovery disk made from an image that was current it would have been that much easier.

I am looking for suggestions on a program that will will basically make a copy of my HD and let me burn it to a disk/s so when the inevitable HD failure/Windows disaster happens it's simply a matter of popping in the recovery disk and I am back to where I was. Symantec Ghost is the program that created the disks we used and it was a easy process. I had to look up the instructions via Google but that took all of 1 min and away we went. Is there any recommendations besides Symantec Ghost or is it the best? I prefer a free program obviously but I am more than willing to pay for an app of this type.

I'm not really looking to create a partition on my HD and than putting the recovery image on there since that does me no good if the HD fails. I am looking to back up to CD/DVD.

Paragon Disk Manager seems to be a good one. I've only used it once or twice, but DennisD knows a lot more about than I do. Maybe he will comment.

Using Norton Ghost 2003 here and I use a boot floppy to execute making/restoring images.

I think that the free offer for Paragon may be still available even though expired.Will have a look around.

Thanks Humpty and Tom.

I take nobody else uses these types of programs?