I learned a very hard lesson about backups earlier this year. I had a massive plumbing leak at my house while I was out of town that wiped out all of my computers & external drives. I thought that I had backups covered because I had everything important on multiple drives but for some unknown reason I hadn't thought about the possibility of all of them being wiped out at once (that kind of thing happens to other people & not me). I would consider some kind of cloud backup so that you don't run into the same problem. I use both Google Drive & MS OneDrive for free but I think that I'm limited to 15 & 30 GB respectively unless I buy additional space (& I think that I'm grandfathered in to the larger free sizes so new members might be restricted to ~5-10 GB). Both of them are integrated into Windows Explorer so that you just have to store files/directories in the location on your hard drive that is designated for cloud synchronization. This might not work for you if you don't want everything stored in the sync location. You could however have your automated backup system move these files/directories from their original location to the sync location so that they are also automatically stored in the cloud. Of course if both the original locations & the sync location are stored on your local drive then you would then be taking up twice the space on that drive. You could possibly work around this to some extent by having the cloud sync location stored on an external drive so that you get both cloud & external drive backup at the same time without taking up twice the space on your local drive. The caveat to this is that I'm not sure how well the cloud sync engines deal with temporarily unavailable drives (i.e. when you unplug your external HD).