I know it's no help now but an external backup drive is best way to go in my opinion. I have a 200 gig external drive formated as an NTFS volume with compresion turned on. I use Easybackitup to do the actual backups 2 to 4 times a month. I use Easybackitup becuase it just basically copies any changed files to the backup drive instead of compressing them or puting them in some proprietary format. That way I just copy back the files I need if there is a problem. I can even use the backup as an additional runtime for my laptop. I only backup my data and downloads, operating systems and software I can always reinstall.