The Texan,

If it's just 7 or 8 gigs of music you really need to back up, a DVD backup would certainly be your best option, you wouldn't need more than 3 (assuming you have a dvd burner, of course)

As for the rest of the drive, it really depends on how much of the drive is actually used. If you're ghosting it, you can usually count on the ghost image size being half the size of all your data, once the music is left out (mp3's are already compressed upt he wazoo).

I would suggest burning all the music to a dvd, deleting it (if it's not on a seperate partition) and then making a ghost image. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the image could be easily burned on 5 dvd's or less. Then you can copy the music back.

I'd do it this way because the mp3 files will not be compressed enough in the image to make any difference, and will signifigantly reduce the size of the image file, while at the same time allowing you easy access to the music backup.

Bottom line though, the most cost effective way to back up your data is essectially dependent on how much data you have.