OK, so I've figured for a while that "prayer backup 1.0" was probably not a good backup strategy. We don't do that for our DVR - it has failover drives - and we shouldn't be doing that for the laptop or the desktop. I had thrown an old drive into a usb enclosure, but really it wasn't big enough to do a meaningful backup, and it had to be plugged in at a certain time of the day on each machine or it didn't back up. Guess how often it was plugged in at the right time?

Well, I bought an external terabyte drive with the intention of doing full system backups. I heard that Vista had that capability built in now, and intended to use that. Well, apparently not in the Home Premium edition, and not in the 32bit Ultimate Edition intsall I had either. Since a backup of the PC (not just the data files) was my goal I looked to third party software to fill in the void.

What I ended up finding was Acronis True Image Home 2009 - it will back up a partition while it is in use. It will do that in the format of a differential backup, an incremental backup, a full backup, and more. There are many different configuration options, but the one feature that really sold me was that it will back up only if the selected media is there. However, if it misses a backup, the next time it detects the selected media is present again it will start the backup! So now - no more having to have a hard drive at the right place at the right time of the day - Acronis handles it for me. And it's pretty reasonably priced too - the first copy is $50, but they have a deal where you can get a second copy for $20 more, and $35 / copy is really not bad.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone else in the same situation.