How to clone system

I'm new to Macs and I got a MBP recently.

In Windows, I would always make a ghost image of my C drive after I had set everything up correctly and save it to a different drive in case I needed to reinstall everything on the C drive because of serious errors or to get a clean install and get rid of crap that had accumulated. It was much easier to re-image from the ghost than to reformat, install Windows and install all of the software again and get it all activated.

I now have loaded all of the software that I need to use (FCPS2, CS3 Master Collection and Office 2004) and it is all up and running nicely. I have also set up Mail (why isn't it called iMail?) but I have no personal data yet that needs to be backed up.

What I would like to do now is create a ghost (clone?) of the setup in case anything goes wrong I can just ghost the saved image back to the hard drive and have the computer the way it is now.

I have no idea how to do this on a Mac.

I have an external firewire drive available to store the clone image.
Would someone please advise me on how to do this on a Mac or where to look for instructions? Will I need additional software or does OSX have utilities to do this?

Thanks a lot for any advice.