Which program do you use and how often do you do it?

I have been doing it manually with no specifice interval by just drag and drop to my usb harddrive. I want to swith to autobackup that has option to select the folders to backup. Do not want to do music/pictures backup everynight.

I've read in threads here about a utility called Robocopy. It's a command-line utility with an impressive number of command-line options. You should be able to tweak those options to INCLUDE the files you do want or EXCLUDE the files you don't want.

Thanks Diggler. Any with gui? with daily, weekly and monthly automation???

Check out SyncToy v1.4, a free PowerToy from Microsoft. Works on XP & Vista.

another bump for sync toy. been using it for some time

I use Acronis True Image, myself. You can use it to back up an image of your hard drive, or to back up specific folders and files. The software does contain a scheduler so that you can automate your backups.

I use Norton Ghost only b/c I got it free after rebate. So far I've been pleased, but I've never compared it to the others. A lot of my programmers really like Acronis.

Cobian Backup works great and it's free.
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

SyncToy v2.0 was released 08/15/2008.
Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista; Windows XP
Download Link
Documentation

Please be sure to read the Overview and Installation Notes (on the download page) before installing, especially if you use a previous version of SyncToy.