Designing a Good Backup Strategy
The elements of a good backup strategy include flexibility, speed, disaster recovery, and reliability.
If you want to get all of these in a single backup program, use an image backup program that also backs up files and makes it easy to restore them. The backup utility in Windows 7 meets these criteria, but you can also achieve it with the commercial backup programs listed earlier as well as with Seagate Auto Backup cable, Iomega drives with Retrospect HD and Retrospect Express, Verbatim drives with Nero BackItUp and Burn Essentials, and the backup utilities in the top-of-the-line multimedia suites from Nero and Roxio.
You can also use a mix-and-match strategy of making image backups with free software from Seagate or Western Digital (if you are using their internal hard disks) and using a file backup program for your data files. If you are serious about backup, through, I think you’ll grow weary of trying to manage two different backup programs.