Most of the older backup programs (and that includes MS backup) were designed to backup to tape, using a block copy rather than a file copy mechanism (because tape uses sequential block read/write rather than random access), which is why they aren't terribly easy to work with.
With large external disks so cheap, it's really much easier to work with file-based disk-disk backup. If you want to avoid manually backing stuff up, then use a 3rd party tool (or use built-in scheduling tools).
As an aside, I'm currently helping a client with a fairly sophisticated Exchange 2007 system, with 3 CCR clusters backed up nightly to a backup server, using disk to disk for speed, as there's almost 1TB backed up nightly.
The only problem is, the backup server isn't set up to then stream the backup files off to tape during the day, so the "backup" gets overwritten every 24 hours...
SD