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Well I've been using a mac ibook g4 for around a year and a half and there is so much that I still don't know about it! I make regular back ups on my windows pc with ghost. I save an image of my drives to an external HD. I need to do the same for my mac but am not sure of the best way of doing it. Can disk utility do something like this or should I be looking for a third party app?
I remember once reinstalling OS X and doing an archive and install, but when it came to trying to actually use what had been archived the freshly installed OS couldn't find the files? Mabye It was my mistake (most likely) but I think this shoes how much of a novice I am at this

Any help is much appreciated.

Carbon Copy Cloner should do the trick for you
this G4 powerbook probably hasn't USB 2 yet (I guess), so you'll prefer an external disk(case) with firewire connector.
The program above is highly recommended, as otherwise you may get stuck in access rights and 'file in use' trouble on a 'live' system.

in those pre-OSX-days you would have simply connected the external disk, turn off filesharing (if activated) and drag all items from the internal to the external drive.
You could verify the success by setting the external drive as startup and boot from there, bingo... off topic, but couldn't resist

cheers, Tom

Thanks astro Is this something that you've used before?

yes, I once used it to clone a system (10.2 or 3) for a unsupported machine - worked great.
Used it recently with 10.4 Intel and trapped myself in access rights...
hadn't specified a master password on the source machine at all - but the booting copy insisted on entering it... empty string was of course an invalid entry
imho CCC is a pretty smart piece of work - by it's logs you can actually tell how complicated a boot in OSX really is...

cheers, Tom