With all the extra automation that Microsoft keeps building into Windows, you might think that disk housekeeping software is a thing of the past. In fact, it's needed just as much today as it has ever been, though not everybody will find a use for all the utilities on offer.

Most housekeeping tasks come down to fiddling with your hard drive. Whether it's to create a backup of your system disk to protect yourself from catastrophic hardware failure, or the need to manage hard drive partitions to get the most out of your available storage, it's changes to the information on your fixed drive that matter most.

If you stop and think about it, the contents of your hard drive define your PC. All your Windows settings, the applications you have available and the documents you create are a function of the storage on your hard drive - change the hard drive and you change the 'personality' of your PC.

Utilities that can make essential changes to the structure of your hard drive and take steps to secure its contents need to be both effective and easy to use. Any change at this low level to the structure of your data comes with a risk of inadvertent damage, so it's especially important that you understand what you're doing at every step.

There are two main types of hard disk housekeeping utility we're looking at here. There are utilities, typified by Ghost and Drive Image, which copy a complete image of everything on your hard drive onto a DVD, external drive or network server, so you can reinstate things if you have a drive failure or when you upgrade to a new device.

Then there are utilities to manage the partitions on your hard drive, the virtual divisions which split up your information onto different parts of the drive. These can be used to organise the way you store your stuff or to handle two or more different operating systems on the same PC.

Here are three examples of each type of utility, along with Norton SystemWorks Professional, a bundle from Symantec which aims to cover all the bases.

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