There are many backup Solutions available; both on the Cloud (Dropbox for lite users; Carbonite for heavy users) and Hardware Based (NAS Storage; Sonicwall CDP)

But If you are an individual or a small office and have no more money than an external hard drive to spend on; a simple XCOPY backup solution is what will get you through

• Open a Notepad and add commands as below
• XCOPY /e/c/y/v/d <source directory> <target directory>
• You may add as many XCOPY commands as you would like considering the directories that need to be backed up
• An effective XCOPY backup command when run should be error free; without user prompt and incremental. You should use the appropriate syntax to achive this. You may refer to URL for syntax details
• Once done save the text file as <filename>.bat
• If its one time backup you want; you may run the file just once.
• If its a scheduled backup; use the default windows Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) to setup a periodic backup schedule