Having just been through the process of rebuilding a Windows XP desktop machine when the disk died, I'm anxious to make it a lot less painful. I didn't lose any data, but reinstalling everything took ages.

Clonezilla seems to be a highly mentioned free backup tool. How easy would it be to implement the following:

• a nightly unattended backup of the desktop's disk image to another network machine (or a second drive in the machine), hopefully with compression.
• restore from that image using USB boot media.

so that if I come in to work and find the hard drive has tanked, it is just a matter of replacing the dead drive with a new one, booting from the USB stick, choosing the image to restore, and then finding something else to do for an hour or two. When it is finished I would hopefully be back to where I was.