With ghost it will depend on where you plan to back up a snapshot of your hard drive. You can burn the .gho and .gst(I think It's been a few years since I worked with ghost) onto a DVD. When I worked with ghost we would either utilize a ghost server or create a network share and pull the images to there.

As for the updates, I would pre-download them and store them somewhere you can access during installation. Since you mentioned you wanted to work on your MCSE (I believe it was you, I could be wrong) it would be an excellent time to practice using the automated installation switches covered in the 70-270 exame.