Retrospect is a backup program that started in the Mac world and moved on to PCs. It was for many years developed by Dantz software, a smallish operation and very highly focussed; however, lately it has been bought up by EMC, a giant corpporate, and has changed focus (shall we say!!!) to be more about big iron and less about single use.
The copy included with Maxtor drives is a bit challenging - it likes to build a recovery CD using all sorts of inputs (your original setup media, is one part!) which normal home users are very unlikely to have easily to hand; so the promised "one touch restore" process Maxtor are offering is quite difficult to set up.
For a simpler approach to backing up and restoring your PC, take a look at Acronis, as the other poster suggested. It's pretty good at understanding various PC types and supports external USB drives quite well. Don't be distracted by the various versions - what you want is the one that boots your PC off their standard Acronis CD. I have found a few PCs which disagree with the CD based approach but most of these are old and small and weird.
Ghost was a pretty reasonable alternative but guess what - that was when it was owned by alittle software house. Since it has been bought up by Norton/Symantec, it has become a little less useful, in my view.
Can you see a pattern here?
