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I use two levels of backup; one to protect against component failure of a drive, mother board, etc and the second to protect against my home being burned down or blown up..

The first level is ridiculously easy and quick. For my thousands of photos, I have archived them to CD’s/DVD’s and plan to replace/duplicate them every 6-8 years to avoid degradation of the CD/DVD material. And then for photos as well as music files, important documents, and financial records, I have an external 250GB hard drive and I use an automatic backup program by Karen Kenworthy (http://www.karenware.com) called Karen’s Replicator. It is easily configured to copy any folder to another device or networked computer on a specified schedule. It is awesome and along with another 15-20 excellent utilities, is available for free online or for a measly $5, Karen will send you a CD with all the latest versions.

Then for the second level of catastrophic protection for the most important files (mostly the financial and some personal info), I use MOZY.COM offsite storage. They will allow up to 2GB of totally free storage and you can set up your own schedule. With MOZY you are not limited to folder copying, they allow you to select individual files. For a little money, you can store much more if you have the need..

So except for copying some photos to CD/DVD media, everything is automated on a schedule that makes sense for the frequency with which I access/change/create files of other types in various programs. Piece of cake… So long as my power doesn’t fail…!!!!! And it’s cheap; just costs me a few CD’s/DVD’s a year for creating a “hard” copy of the photos..