Personally, and I have worked with computers for over 35 years now, I only use hard drives, which I stick into external docking stations, like EZ Dock.
I have 4 HDDs in my main computer and 9 drives I can plug in into the external device. They vary in size from 750GB to 3TB.
I don't use ANY of the default folders offered by Windows, but rather have a main Data folder, with subfolders named according to the type of data stored in them. JPEG, Word, Excel, Websites, eBay, Roboform, Thunderbird (email) etc. Every 2 weeks that main data folder gets backed up on a different disc drive. At this time my backup is right at 40GB
This has worked perfectly for me a a number of friends for years.
BTW, I also clone the C: drive on a drive inside the computer (using True Image 11), so if anything ever happens to my system drive, that is not recoverable, I can switch to that OS backup in my BIOS and am running with all the programs I had installed upon the last cloning date.
I use Windows XP Pro with a MSI motherboard and a dual core 3.2 GHz AMD CPU
I have found commonly used backup programs to be too flaky for my requirements.
I have a website at http://www.FixPCflaws.com

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