Backing up my entire Hardrive

So I bought an external 80 gig hard-drive and i was wondering if it's possible to make an actual clone of my current hard-drive, that way, if it fails I have this one to simply transfer. Will this work? IE will all the programs I have installed still work if my hard drive fails and I have transfer the backup? I have some very expensive software (music editing stuff, and I tend to lose my install discs), and I'd hate to have lose it due to a hard drive failure.


Thanks

Dan

also my drive is a USB 2.0 I heard that you can't boot from that on tiger...I guess that's not a big deal if it's true as long as I can simply move my backup into my new internal hard drive if one fails and needs to be replaced.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

You can make a complete copy of your hard drive with that, then if you main hard drive fails you can just set it to boot from that backup and everything will work just like it did at the time you made the copy.

edit: I don't know if you can boot from USB 2.0, but it wouldn't hurt to try it.