Backing up computer on external hard drive

I have an external hard drive which I have partitioned into two sections. One is a bootable partition so I can boot from that should my computer drive fail and the other section is just for backup storage. The computer I want to back up is my PowerBook G4. Is there a widget that can help me back up everything including applications or can I just "drag and drop" from computer to external? I know that I can drag my user file to get all my stuff but want to see if I can back up my applications too!
Anyone have any feedback on this?

there are several ways to do it, try a utility such a carbon copy cloner...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
you can clone your whole mac to the external drive, so you have a bootable backup, or just backup selected areas

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