Welcome mobrian,

Thats a bummer when you loose data like that. I have a pretty simple and effective backup system. I have two harddrives both the same size. One has everything on it (work, email, apps, temp areas etc) and the other is a clone of it. Not a RAID type clone tho. Just a copy of every file and I never delete anything off of the clone drive unless its been deleted off the normal one and it also happens to be huge and taking up a lot of space. I.e. you very rarely touch that second drive (until everything goes **** up and you need a full recovery).

Then I just use XCopy (comes with windows) machines to get the copy done.

heres my batch fie:
Code:
xcopy E:\*.* F:\ /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H
pause
Now and again just run it. Every few days or when I have just done some work or took some unique photos I dont want to loose etc. I have a similar one when I use an external USB harddrive too.

So stage 1 (local 2nd HDD) protects me from local files getting corrupted or apps crashing and half writing files or I accidentally delete something.

Stage 2 (external USB) is for when my machine blows up taking all the drives out. I would loose a week or maybe two but it would not be catastrophic.

Stage 3 is where I have some stuff "off site" but that does take more effort so its for key data only.

I have lost really important stuff in the past too. But since I have adopted this method I have never lost anything important even tho I have had HDDs and my whole machine die too.