Indeed. Doug, if it works for you then I won't rain on your parade. But I can't tell you how many times I've helped clients of mine, and they bring out their ancient external hard drive with dust all over it, and they say something to the effect of "I don't remember the last time I got this out."

I don't trust a single one of my clients to do manual backups. Heck, I don't trust myself to do them. So I don't recommend any solution that isn't automatic.

The next question is where to store the backup. Local or the cloud? I guarantee that none of my clients will be taking drives home and bringing them back (refer to the dusty hard drive). So while a local backup is good, and protects from things like drive failures and accidental deletions/changes, it doesn't protect from things like fire/flood/theft (I always feel like an insurance salesman at this point). I had one client get his systems flooded by a burst pipe from an office above him. But he had a cloud backup and got everything back. And he got everything up to the minute before the flooding.

So my personal order of importance for backup features is:

-automatic
-cloud-based
-local

Again, Doug, if your system works for you then great. But I deal with a ton of different computer users, and every last one of them needs a system that they don't think about and keeps them as protected as possible. That always means something like Carbonite or iDrive.