My 5 year old iMac's hard drive is at the point of failing.  I'm trying to save al files on it, but it wont allow backup via Time Machine to an external hard drive.  How can I keep from losing all the files and programs if the hard drive fails?

I'm concerned that my iMac, purchased 5 years ago, is about the crash and I can't back up my files and programs to an external hard drive via Time Machine because the computer freezes after only a couple hundred MB and gets nowhere near the required amount.
How can I save these files and programs if the computer hard drive fails or has to be replaced without the backup being able to be done? I need to do something quickly, but I'm not sure what I can or should be doing.

Get an external hard drive, some good ones that I like are the OWC, http://www.macsales.com Mercury Elite Pro drives...they are very good and reasonably priced.
Get the drive, connect via USB or FireWire, then use Disk Utility to format the new drive as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), and then use Disk Utility to Restore the current drive to the new drive.  Restore actually clones the drive so you will have a bootable backup on the external drive.
After you have formatted and named the external drive, click Restore in the main Disk Utility window, drag the name of the old hard drive to the Source box, and drag the name of the new external drive to the Destination box.  DU will make an exact clone of the internal drive on the external drive.
That clone will be a complete backup of the operating system and all of your data.
You can test it by restarting the iMac and hold the Option key.  That will give you a grey screen showing all bootable drives.  Just click the external drive, then click the upward pointing arrow under it and the iMac will boot from that drive.

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