Windows 7: How do you guys maintain backups?

Question as in the title, really:
how do you keep backups?
Do you use an external hard drive and manually copy files, do you use an application like time machine/time machine clones, do you use windows' own backup solution? Do you keep many copies or backups, or just one?

Tell and discuss why you use!

I manually copy files onto a 500GB external hard drive, but also use dropbox, a smalle hard drive, usb thumb drives etc to store my backups (infrequent dumps on external, documents saved to dropbox and a usb thumb drive frequently/when I need them off-site).

Generally I try to follow the 'rule of three' for backups:
since years of using linux has taught me the value of backups (I still dont do large scale backups often, which is a bad habit, really).

I also use windows live sync to keep files synched between my desktop and my laptop (a sort of backup, I suppose).



Does anyone use a good backup app?

I do all my backups with Acronis True Image daily to an external hard drive.. I have an initial install image, and a current image.. Thats it..

I take a daily image with free Macrium. That saved my bacon already a few times. I have scheduled it to automatically start at Boot-up and use an external disk for it. From time to time I cleanup the image file and retain only a few in a "monthly" backup file. But I always keep the one I took right after initial installation - kind of in lieu of the factory recovery partition.

Sir, sir! Do we get extra marks for this?

#1) I keep all of my important files on a dedicated file server in the back room of my house
#2) I keep a second hard drive in the server which is synchronized very 6 hours with a robocopy script
#3) I keep 2 external drivers (1 off site), where I run robocopy and mirror up the data on my server to the external drive. These are synced about once per week.

#4) On my workstation, I do a "system image" using Acronis about once per month. Image my C drive to my D drive. I have nothing of real value on my workstation so I don't need much in terms of backup for that.

I make weekly image backups using Macrium, very fast & does a nice job compressing the image to almost 1/2 it's original size. The image is kept on a separate drive used for storage.

Also will make an image before any major install.

Ap

I make weekly backups with 3 different methods. I make 2 images with Acronis True Image. Then I make 1 backup with Paragon Drive Backup 9.5 Professional. Then I make 1 backup with Windows native backup. All to a 2nd internal HDD. I'm counting on Acronis to save me if needed, but I have backup backups

A Guy

I use an external hard drive (USB) which is also encrypted. I don't really care much for the installation itself but the actual files are what's important. I have the original installation CD so the system is not a problem to replace. The files you can't replace.

I Have a WD Mybookworld network Drive and I backup Manually and I use WD anywhere Backup

Every few months I drag the User files from each our seven home computers over the network onto an external where I replace the previous set,

then about every six months I plug the external to each computer and save a Windows 7 Backup Image, rename it slightly to place in the specific computer's folder alongside User folders and a baseline image taken after setup.

I consider this the stripped-down manual method as I don't like backup programs that use computer resources and take up more space than is needed.