A hard drive with multiple partitions or another boot drive would be a good start. A good tool for the Mac by the way (if you use OSX) is "Super Duper" which w

A hard drive with multiple partitions or another boot drive would be a good start. A good tool for the Mac by the way (if you use OSX) is "Super Duper" which will clone your hard drive. Then you can simply pick the cloned drive as your boot drive and if it boots you will know you have a good backup. That is how I test that my backup works. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription... When I was recently traveling I took several pocket hard drives with clones of my laptop drive so if the drive failed (or the laptop failed) I could hook the hard drive up to another laptop (one rented or purchased) and boot from that.