just realize that windows has a buildin cmdline tool called "robocopy" for your backup needs. it is just efficient and powerful enough for this simple yet important task! check out the help options available for this command.

a typical scenario of backup is that you want to keep an exact same mirror copy of your data to a different harddrive or external storage, e.g. d:\data -> h:\data-mirror. robocopy will copy all new and changed data from the source folder to your destination folder. please note that in mirror mode it is a one way mirror operation, i.e. only changes at the source folder will be updated to the destination folder. any changes in destination folder will be discarded by default. this is NOT a two-way synchronization solution, nor an image based ghost method. I do prefer a mirror method for backup data coz it's faster in an incremental manner, and backup system is a different thing to me.

• before doing the actual backup, you can check the changes available in your source folder compared with your destination folder:  robocopy.exe d:\data h:\data-mirror\ /MIR /L
  
• do the actual backup by removing the /L switch.
  
• you can exclude folders by adding switch /XD, e.g. /XD cache4 Cache, and exclude files by adding switch /XF , e.g. /XF *.lock *.tmp
  

robocopy is a buildin tool of windows since xp, if i were not wrong. so you will never need to search ass off to find a usable commercial product or risk in using cracked software, and after all they are not necessarily better. most importantly robocopy pretty much does its job fast and reliable.

hope this post helps.