Yonks ago when the earth was young, I wrote a batchfile (remember those?) that copied all my important stuff once a week to a separate drive on another computer. The "old clunker" approach. It created a new folder with the date as part of its name. It did this automatically at 4am, a time when I'm usually fast asleep.
Once in a while (ie when the backup 500GB drive starts to get full), I go and delete a load of backups. I usually end up keeping something like: last 4 weeks, last 4 month-ends, last 4 quarter-ends, last 4 year-ends.
It "just works".
More recently, I added a second routine that repeats the backup to a USB drive on the main machine.
If the laptop is on, and connected to the home network at 6am, it does much the same.
If anyone's looking to do the same without the palaver of a separate backup suite, this is the first couple of lines of the code, run by Windows Task Scheduler:
@ECHO Keef's Backer-Upper for Laptop to Server
xcopy C:\Word\*.* S:\T43BU%date:~6,4%%date:~3,2%%date:~0,2%\C\Word\*.* /C /D /S /Y
It continues in that vein for a dozen or so lines.
S: is the 500GB drive on the "server".