Probably what I do for backups won't resonate with the sophisticated users we have here, but it works for me.

I use a program called "Karen's Replicator" which, as far as I know, is no longer being sold following Karen's demise, but with a little searching you might find a copy of it. It is a brute force backup that basically creates a file-for-file copy of your source drive. If a source file changes, that file is deleted from the backup and replaced with a new copy of the changed file.

Yes, it is not economical on hard drive space, but who cares, with hard prices down to a little over half a cent per megabyte on my most recent purchase. It is reasonably configurable with a very non-intuitive user interface. I just set it to copy everything, even the recycle bins, and let it go at that.

My backup procedure is... crude. The things I really want safe (my eBooks, my music) I copy into a backup directory on the same hard drive. Then I back up that complete hard drive to another hard drive in the same computer. Then I back up that backed-up drive to an external hard drive. Then every few months I visit my neighbor and retrieve my off-premises external hard drives and back up the backed-up backup drives to those.

I am a grumpy curmudgeonly Luddite, and don't feel at all comfortable having my data not under my complete control at my fingertips -- so no cloud backup for me, even if my absolutely blazing 1.2 Mbps upload speed made it possible. [Update: I just checked, today I am getting the best speed I have had in years, 14.9 Mbps download, 2.0 Mbps upload. Wow!] By my figuring, it would take 150 days, 24 hours a day, to upload my data, by which time a lot of it would be obsolete.

Anyway, I am happy with my backup system, crude though it may be.

tanstaafl.