TechnoMage said:
For such a question, there will be as many different answers as there are respondents. Eh?

One very wise man once said, "the only bad backup is the one you decided NOT to make."

I try not to make that BAD decision, and over the years I've probably had more hard drive crashes than the average person.
So I've probably gone above and beyond what would be the minimum backup scheme, to protect my own data files.

To really be safe, all backups should be made to external drives that can be UN-Plugged for safety.
External hard drives have gotten real cheap in the past few years. I have several of them, from a little 80GB, all the way up to a big 2TB drive.

Something that many folks don't take into account, is, if your Backup/Restore program is on your Windows drive, how will you do a restore to a new HD if your old HD has totally Crashed (stopped working, arc'd, sparked and smoked)? It DOES happen!
A: Your Backup/Restore program, and your backup of at least your C: drive, must be on some bootable media, like a CD or Flash Drive.

I boot up my own computer with the "Ghost" program on either a CD or Flash drive and I'm able to then do a backup or restore totally independent of Windows. That gives me great flexibility on doing both backups and restores.
And the nice thing about Ghost (Ghost 11.5, DOS Version) is that it will backup or restore any OS from '98 to W-10/64.
I just used it to copy Windows 10, Pro/64 from an old spinner to a new SSD.

For a quick and easy daily DATA backup, I use a little batch file which I wrote myself, to copy the "My Documents" folder to an external drive. I use the old faithful DOS program "XCOPY" in my batch file, to do the backup. It virtually just takes Seconds to do a daily backup. For Windows and everything else, I use Ghost 11.5 to backup my C: partition to an external USB 3.0 hard drive, and I do this at least once a week.
At least once a month, I do a complete CLONE of my main hard drive to a 2TB drive that I only connect to the PC motherboard when I'm doing the backup. Then I disconnect it, for complete safety, from power surges or lightning strikes.

Once in a while, I have to do a recovery for one of my customers who has had a HD crash. It's really sad when there is NO backup, or the last backup is a year old. So much can be lost and never be recovered when a backup is either old or non-existent.

So in short...... Backup! Backup! Backup!
My self I brought an external caddy that a laptop hard drive can fit inside, got the hard drive from a laptop with 4 GB on it that the keyboard and screen went.
Did a format and when I want to backup I just plug it in and within 30-60 seconds I have backed up any new files that have been added.
So as you have put back in your signature is so true