[BleedBurgundy]

Windows has a backup utility built in. Most consumer security suites also have a built in backup utility, so if you're using something along the lines of Norton 360 or Kaspersky, Trend, etc you should be able to use that fairly easily and back up to an external drive or dvd/blu-ray. That will get your files back.

If you're concerned about keeping a working copy of your system viable, you can image but you'll have to reinstall on mostly identical hardware. Clonezilla is a great freeware resource for this and it allows you to install to a bootable partition on your external hard drive and place the repository on a second partition. Very convenient and fast.

Best solution, imho, is to migrate your machine to a virtual platform (VMware, Virtual PC) and then you can run that off of any system. You'd need to back up the 3 or 4 files that comprise your vm, but that's a very simple process.

Obviously, the level of complexity goes up as you move down that list, but whatever you do, make sure you start backing up. Once it's gone, it's gone.