I don't know what you mean by "an age" - that it a very vague measure of time indeed. How long are you prepared to wait to get your system backed up? Getting your system back if there is a drive problem might take several ages!
Anyway. I have a system with 2 IDE 7,200 rpm hard drives. My windows system partition is 25 GB in size, and it has around 15 GB of data on it. If I boot into DOS and use Norton Ghost 8, I can make a backup image of that partition is about 15 minutes.
You can use Ghost to make an exact copy of a hard drive, including making it bootable.