Yet another opinion here ;-) Me, I use a "real" backup programme, Dantz's
Retrospect (www.dantz.com). What makes it Real IMNSHO is that it keeps its
own catalogues of which files have and haven't been backed up; all of the
toy programs which use the PC file system's "archive" bit will fail to
include files you've changed if you use more than one such program, or
if you back up to multiple places. Retrospect allows you to run, say, 3
sets of backup media, to which it will add all relevant files you've worked
on or created since the last time you used *that* *particular* backup set.
And you can create multiple backup destinations: within the machine - e.g. on
another hard drive or partition in the same machine; on removeable media
- tape, CD-R or -RW, DVD-R/RW; and on other machines (both as normal
network shares, and through the pricier Retrospect client-server
arrangments). Its built-in system-recovery stuff has worked for me on
the one occasion it really needed to; and single-file restores are easy too.

Storage is cheap enough these days (and uk.d-i-y types are almost bound
to have an older PC up in the loft they couldn't bear to throw away!) that
working hard on compression and proprietary formats is probably an error.
(Accepting that Retrospect is a proprietary format, mind, though it does
have a handy "duplicate" subfunction; though something like FileSync will
do that and cost less). You have to think through what's going to be most
of a pain for you to reconstruct. If you have a pretty standard OS install
with just a few add-on apps, the claim that backing up your individually
created data is Enough is relatively plausible: it makes retrieving
accidentally deleted precious stuff easy enough, and leaves you facing an
OS+apps reinstall in the worst case. If you've rather a lot of apps,
patches, updated drivers, firewall customisations, etc. etc. applied to
your OS, and you value your time and sanity, backing up the whole shebang
and TESTING THE EMERGENCY RESTORE PROCEDURE WHEN YOU'RE NOT STRESSED OUT
is a Good Idea.

Whichever solution you go for, it'll be a lot easier if you've created
a number of distinct partitions for different kinds of Stuff than if it's
all lumped under "C:\". F'r instance, on the Winblows systems I run I
have an OS partition (W: or X, a Data partition (D with a subdirectory
for my hand-created most-precious data and one for my apps, a "Fragephera"
partition on F: for temporary files, web cache, and all that junk, a
swap partition (Swapee on E, and one or two "big" partitions for pictures
and music. Oh, for the NT-based systems there's a small FAT partition
which holds BOOT.INI, NTDETECT, and that other initial-boot junk, and
some system recovery tools. Having this stuff in these different
containers makes it easier to create backup strategies for different needs,
and different file systems for different tasks (e.g.: the app and OS
partitions are NTFS, so that any malicious software running under my
"normal, unprivileged" user wouldn't be able to infect most of my
binaries; the audio/picture partitions are tuned to storing a small
number of large files (big clusters), while Fragephera is done with
tiny clusters).

Hope that helps some (and look - no advertising, even peripherally, well
until this point anyway, for the excellent DDS and AIT tape drives made at
the HP site in Bristol ;-) - Stefek