Having recently lost 10Gb worth of non-backed up photos, (yes I am utterly stupid) I've been giving some serious thought to backup strategies. It's made real easy by the fact I have a second low spec PC in a cupboard which I use as a file server and file sharing client (all legal of course).
I've always wondered why seemingly routine tasks such as backup is not catered for in the OS. Sometimes, Windows XP seems to bear little relation to what today's users want to do. I'll save my rant about organising my pictures and mp3 for another post.
Well, Microsoft have gone some way to redeeming themselves when I discovered by accident "SyncToy 1.0" http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0fc1154-c975-4814-9649-cce41af06eb7&DisplayLang=en . This is a seriously useful utility. With it, I can backup my 10Gb of photos, AND my 8Gb of music, and stuff like Outlook PST files etc etc etc, from my main PC to the second PC with a single click. I could even schedule it to do this nightly. I'll let all 0 readers know just how it goes in practice.
p.s. Thankfully I got 80% of my pics back by using iRecover http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/ . It cost me £50, but it worked when a dozen other utilities failed. Very impressive (though the UI has some very odd quirks which I duly ranted to the developer about!)