Backups are not only about recovering from failure or inaccessibility of physical media, although that is often the only thing most people thing about. It's also about how many different points in time you have backups for. Corruption, either physical or logical, can occur in a data file and not be detected for some time. In that case, your most recent backup will probably be useless as it too will contain the corruption, faithfully backed up.
For this reason, I run a very simple, cheap, and as JAD requested, easy to understand and monitor daily backup. Using WinZIP (free trial, inexpensive license), I schedule a daily job for various folders where I keep critical files, so that only the files whose "archive bit" has been changed are backed up, then the archive bit is cleared. (Archive bit is a feature built into WIndows, it's been around for decades).
In short, only the files that were created or modified on that day are backed up. I store this backup right on my main hard disk, because its purposes has nothing to do with recovering from disk failure. Using WinZIP, it is extremely easy to see exactly what was backed up, and when, by simply looking at the file listing inside each ZIP file. Encryption is optional, I do use it, and by having to type in the password for the job each day, I know it is occurring as scheduled.
Of course, I also have various offsite backups, also aged out over time. But if need be, I could probably restore my data files to just about any point in time, at a daily granularity, for any anytime in the last 365+ days.
Intra-day backups are another matter, not sure if this was JAD's original problem. Meaning, suppose I just spent two hours carefully crafting a spreadsheet, which may still be open on my system and therefore not able to be completely backed up via automated means. Once I realize that I really don't want to ever have to repeat those two hours, I stop and manually copy the file somewhere else, maybe under a different name.
