CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Backups are important. They help stop you losing data.
I have a 250GB external hard disk for this purpose. I want to back up two computers to this drive. At the moment, I'm just copying files over to the drive, but it become less ideal as I do more backups to the disk. I wish to back up all the important stuff like the usual documents and stuff, Thunderbird email, Opera internet settings, save game files, and other random important files around the disk.

Ideally, I would want a program that I can tell it where all the important files are, connect the hard disk, then it compares the versions on the backup drive to the working hard disk, and copies over the ones that are newer... like automatically at the push of a button. And having a directory structure I can view from Windows Explorer would also be very useful.

Does anyone have any backup programs they recommend? Preferably freeware..?

I'd suggest a program called Syncback. It does straight copies, but you can configure where and what to copy. Basically, exactly what you want. There are paid versions, but there's a freeware version too.

I use rsync for nearly all my backup needs. It runs on virtually all linux/unix systems (including mac os x). If you are a windows user, you can check out cygwin to get it running on windows. If you are not remotely interested in UNIX/Linux, though, it might not be for you (you don't have to RUN linux on said system, just be willing to play with something link it).

ymmv