Personally, concerning backups, I think there’s no substitute for manually copying your files over to external media such as nother hard disk stored in a safe place or CDs/DVDs.
I’m not too fond of using backup managment programmes, because, in the end, it always means you, to a certain extent, lose control over how your data is saved. And that may bring some nasty surprises along when you actually come to need the backups (Ooops, I can’t make the decompression programme work; for instance).

Manually copying things over, with your own folder structure etc. forces you to maintain a certain order in your documents. In the long run, that order will make your life easier and you’ll be sure, when you need your backups, that they contain exactly what you intended them to contain.

So, my method is just a bunch of CDs, DVDs classified by type of data. The nice things about DVD-Rs is that you get a hell of a lot of data on them, so you won’t actually need all that many of them to backup all your stuff, not like in the CD-R days.

Just my view on the matter…

Cya,
Piffles.