Backing up

[David]

I'm sure she prefers open plan living. 

If I may be permitted    

[pctech]

 

[Rik]

I agree with Dave on data, keep it simple. I use Synctoy, but I augment that with SynBack SE (there's also a free version) which better suits some bits of the backups I do. However, I do recommend the use of Acronis to image at least the OS partition. When you need to recover a sick machine, I've found no better tool.

[Ray]

I agree about Acronis, Rik, I do automatic daily full computer backups of all my machine to my Windows Home Server and weekly Acronis backups to a NAS drive.

[Technical Ben]

Thanks for that I think another couple of external harddrives are required so pop out tomorrow and get them this should do it for me its possible that there is not enough space on the memory usb or  discs to complete the job ,only one point and that is at what point is your media full so you have to overwrite to keep the external or whatever it is up to date if you see my point so I will buy a 250 GB external and this should be ample ..I hope

Probably.
Windows Backup likes to backup the entire drive. So if you have 100gb of stuff, you need that size backup disk (else you have to swap DVDs, I'm not sure windows supports this).
Best to get a like for like size. My main drive is 500GB, and my backup is 300GB (Plus a little 70gb one). So as long as I don't install 300+gb worth of programs, I'm fine. Oh, and it's amazing how quickly you can get to this. My screen cap software for recording games can take up 1gb per min. But looks cool when wining a race in Grid!