My experience is that restoring things from backups is a messy process unless one is highly methodical - which I am not. I've had to do a couple of recoveries and I always end up with some extra files I don't need to transfer but not sure what to do with. But now that drives are so cheap that it doesn't make sense to install anything under 1 TB, there's room for everything.
Here's a backup/imaging tool that's been helpful for me:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/With that, you can setup rolling incremental backups to catch any new or changed files and the interface to restore stuff is really nice. I also use it to create images of the systems so I can re-pave them back to a known good state when/if Windoze starts getting twitchy. Ideally, you'd use it to backup files to a separate physical disk (that disk could be internal, USB, across a network to another system...).
A lot of the newer PCs have RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) capabilities built right onto their motherboards, and this can be leveraged to mirror a disk (mirroring is referred to as raid-1). This way if one drive fails, the system remains running along off the mirror. Then you can swap out the bad drive, the system repopulates it, and so on... I have a central system setup with RAID that I use to store all the data, files, photos, music, school stuff, backups, etc... and then my laptops and desktops just map network drives to that - so it looks like a local disk, but its really being stored off on this robust linux system. You can buy little RAID network disk appliances that do this exact same thing and are easy to setup - just connect them into your home network and configure it via a simple web browser menu-type interface:
http://www.frys.com/product/6255620?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PGIts obviously more costly up front to do that (not to mention geeky
), but man does it make swapping out or re-imaging desktop systems easy. That's where I've always had most of my grief...
