What are you guys suggesting? A second hard drive? Won't CDRWs work? Would a zip drive do just as well?
This is one of those....it all depends... What memory, and hard drive size, .... processor speed do you now have?
If you use an imaging program to back up your entire hd, then often you would need several cd's to burn, and there is always the possibility of a bad cd, or like the problem you had tonite.
A 2nd hd would be faster to backup and restore from, several images can be stored on them and is another safeguard for important data rather than just relying on a cdrw. Forget tape drives, they are horribly slow, outdated hardware.