That is what I hate about external drives and their proprietary backup programs. I've gotten burned like this in the past also. Same thing with online backups. I don't have a fast enough DSL connection for that to be running all the time either and don't trust anything in the "cloud".

These programs supposedly back everything up but when the chips are really down and you need to reinstall seems there is always some issue where it does not go as planned. That and the program runs continually backing stuff up hogging system resources.

I've just gotten to where I copy and paste critical files I want to an external hard drive. I've got my file hiearchy set up where it's pretty easy to do.

I also bought a couple spare hard drives that are the same capacity as what is in my Windows 7 machine.

If you have the capabilities to use SATA connections I just clone my entire hard drive a few times per year using Acronis software.

That copies the operating system, all files, programs and makes an exact duplicate drive.

In the event of some horrible hard drive failure  I simply slide the cloned drive in and am back up and running. Might be missing a few things but all the special customizations and programs I have added plus previous years data is all right there ready to go.