I'm one that doesn't like these restore partitions because they effectively set your system back to as it was when you bought it.
If that was some time ago then you could have a lot of windows updates to do not to mention if it came pre-installed with trial software that you had got rid of you would have to do all that again.
Drive Imaging software (as essexboy mentions) is a real life saver, I do a weekly full image of my primary drive partitions and save them on my secondary hard drive, you can also save to an external drive or burn to DVD, etc. I have had to use my backup in anger a number of times and restoring my complete disk image took under 15 minutes, it had been well worth the money. I'm using the last version of Drive Image version 7.1 before Symantec bought out PowerQuest, the makers of Drive Image and another of my favourite programs Partition Magic.