I use a Windows Home Server to do all of my backups. I back up three laptops and a desktop to the server each night. It then keeps two weeks of nightly backups, two months of weekly backups and two years of monthly backups. This covers the full system in each case, plus any data changes. This is all automated through WHS and is one of its prime purposes.
If a file is modified or deleted and one of my kids or wife need to get what the file looked like yesterday or last week or last month, I can recover whichever version they want. The server also mirrors the information across multiple disks, so that I would have to loose three drives all at the same time to actually lose any file. The server has hot swappable drives, so if a drive goes bad, I can just pop it out, put in a new one and the data for that drive will be rebuilt from the other three. The last piece I would like to set up is to have it also store all data to another home server located some place else (like my parent's house). That would keep even the total loss of all hardware in the house from being catastrophic. There are WHS plug-ins that will handle this as well.
I also copy all of my picture directories over to the server manually so that I have a redundant location of all my original files. This may be over kill, but it simplifies things if I just want to get a file back. All of these files are directly accessible over the internet from any location so there are times when I want to show someone a picture and I don't have my laptop and can just pull it directly from the server.
This is not an expensive solution for what it does. I ordered the Acer 2GB/1TB HOME SERVER from B&H, which contains one Western Digital Caviar 1TB drive. I also ordered three more Western Digital 1TB CAVIER drives which matched the original installed drive. That gives me 4TB of storage of which I am currently running at about 20% capacity. If I get up to about 75% then I will start swapping 2TB drives in. Doing this one at a time, each will rebuild itself and after four are swapped it will be running at double the capacity. Total cost of the system last year was $632.99. The drives are currently $25 cheaper and the computer is $10 more. Running full time, it pulls 20-40 watts thanks to the "green" drives and low power consumption of the server. The server can also be your print server if you want and has USB ports for any external drives you currently have, plus a front USB port for backing up data keys.
This is all plugged into a large UPS that can keep the server and my routers up and running for 4 hours. The server will do a graceful shut down at 50% battery power allowing the router to continue to function for another 4 hours or so.
