Carol, hopefully others will come along with their ideas so you can pick the best of the bunch that suits your style. I am like Randy and use Acronis True Image, mine is version 7, for my backups. You would need something similar for the initial backup. I got mine when Acronis made it a free offer for a while. The idea was to get us to use it then buy the upgrade, a nice ploy too but I have stayed with version 7 so far. Regarding the timed backups of your personal data you might consider creating one folder for your work with sub folders for each program you use rather than allow each to store their work where they want it. Then it is a simple matter of copying that folder with all it's sub folders to the external drive any old time your heart desires. Using the method I have described you will overwrite the previously saved data folder. You will be prompted to agree to overwrite so you then have a choice of renaming the folder if you want more than one copy of your saved work.

Acronis is an excellent program, I have it. There are some free imaging programs also. You would be imaging the entire drive including the opearting system so should you have a need to use the image it would put it back exactly the way it was when you did the image, it is just like taking a snapshot of the drive. This site does a good job of explaining how to use it and also you can purchase it from them for a reduced cost. Using Acronis Acronis 8 free software to image/backup/ghost your computer (free alternatives to Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc.). with imaging you can back up to an external hard drive, another internal hard drive, a partition, cd or dvd, flash there are many options depending on the product used. I still also keep a copy on a flash drive and online storage of my most important files and pictures etc just to be extra safe.

I have many times had to Replace Hard Drives that Crashed (at least 5). Use to take care of a couple Small Businesses computers. If it hadn't been for the Cloned Drives I would have spent countless hours reinstalling everything and restoring files. I too have lots of systems to oversee. No, many aren't mine and I can only recommend Backing up, cloning, etc... That doesn't mean that one will be done! We have 5 Laptops, 1 Desktop, and 1 Tablet all on Windows 10 here at my house. I only Clone 3 of those computers! My old boss lost her home computers hard drives twice, loosing everything before she learned to listen to me! I did get her started on a Cloning Program and it did save her the next time her computer crashed. Not sure what this woman did to her computers, but she had many problems. I do recall her saying they had power outages in their area all of the time, but she did have her pc on a UPS Battery Backup system. She had a ton of valuable information on her home computers, as did her small businesses computers which I maintained for her. Never had any problems with the Work Computers, maybe because she didn't use them (The Office Manager and Employees used them)! Yes, even a dormant hard drive can die, although I've never had that happen. The Business Computers I Cloned usually had Two Clones made. Usually One copy was in the Safe at the Workplace and the other usually stored in a Safety Deposit Box at a Bank!

I have both One Drive and iCloud installed. I own a PC and an iPad and iPhone. I was told by an MS person I had to save received documents twice by, once in One Drive and again in my libraries. So two manual saves. I learned just recently Microsoft will save to both places automatically. I can now sync my pics from my iPhone to the PC in one library called PC>pics and don't have duplicate places. I also don't want folders in folders so all the pictures are opened and it is simple. The MS guy who set it up had different pics in several of One Drive/Pics locations and I added to confusion. Up to this point I was saving anything in two places on my PC because I knew no better. You are right I have very little in my saved places on my PC and thought this USB external drive that will work with my HP 2.0 or 3.0 USB will take care of everything but my music on iTunes if you all approved of this particular drive. This is for home use only and I have a lifetime of space. The One Drive is still on here but hidden from me. So this will back up my whole PC computer?