SuperDuper

Sounds like you do this often - What kind of problems lead to to the conclusion that you have to erase and reinstall everything? This is quite unusual to do this more than once or twice on any Mac. There's some good backup software available - Carbon Copy Cloner is very good -...

Have you checked out Apple Discussions? Not to turn you away, I just know it is not solved in Leopard--there are conditions under which it will work. Also see SuperDuper's page for more info on this.

What do you want to do with the external? You have a clone of your machine and you can keep that and set CCC to do scheduled clones of everything, or only selected items if you wish Maybe doing a full clone once a month or so. Or now you have a clone and you don't change the system files much you could look at tools like iBackup or LaCie Silverkeeper (both those are free)...

Yesterday I cloned Leopard from an external drive to my internal HD using SuperDuper and had the same experience you describe (actually I got the eternally spinning gear). Turns out SD doesn't yet support Leopard and all the permissions got screwed up. I'm wondering if that's your issue - permissions and ACL's. Any way, the solution I believe is a clean install. Might boot...

Providing your USB flash drive has the necessary capacity SuperDuper will do the job just fine. ...

Well i have heard good and bad about all, you should have faith and feel good about doing the upgrade, that after all is the easiest. Whichever way you go BACK UP THE CURRENT INSTALL FIRST. I used an unregistered copy of SuperDuper & an external firewire drive to do this, then I whipped the disk clean and did a full install. Upon reboot I used the migration assistant to...

SuperDuper! is like a much more polished version of CCC, but comes as shareware as a result. it is better though, and is updated often.

I have had it installed since Friday and have had NO problems. Before the instal I did make a backup on my external FireWire drive using SuperDuper. Since I have had such a good experience and noticing nothing but improvements I will probably overwrite that with my new Leopard backup next week. Do some more reading a LOT of people are having good experiences.

If your media files are originals, then you should give them their own partition. If they're on your machine, TM will back them up. You won't need your SuperDuper partition with Time Machine - Time Machine does the same thing, better.

one for TM, one for SuperDuper and one for photos and music? ...