What do you want to back up, or restore?

If it's just data, (like music, pictures, videos, word documents, archive files) you can backup any way you want.

But if you want to back up installed programs or games, it's a different story. Or if you want to back up entire drives, (like drive images) thats also anoher story.

Just get an off-the-shelf backup tool as a jack of all trades. These tools create backups as well as restore the backups.