Rescue&Recovery tool for T43p & W7

[lukee]

Hello, during last weeks & months, my friend and my brother lost their data from their laptops and they didn't have a backups created. My T43p is running fine but I have no backup solution established yet and I would like to avoid such problems as my friend and my brother 'expensively' paid for. I don't want to pay for such tool so I need to look for some free or opensource backup software. First time, Lenovo's R&R came on my mind - it is free of charge for ThinkVantage capable ThinkPads but I have T43p (mobo from 2668-G1U) with Windows 7 (fully legal MSDN license). T4x series was shipped with Windows XP and I don't know if the R&R will work on W7 & 2668G1U & an aftermarket HDD system combination. I'm working with important math data as well as with some special datamining tools and I would like to prevent such problems and in case of virus or data-loss problems I would like to recover my system quickly to stay productive without concerns.

My requirements:
- transparent backup of selected folders
- minimal impact to a system performance
- hidden partition for my data on the current drive
- quick restore if needed

Some ideas?

[RealBlackStuff]

What you need is an external USB drive and Acronis TrueImage.
Then take a weekly image of your HD and store that on the external drive.
The backup and restore functions of TI are way faster than R&R (if it works...) or other backup pgms.
Also, it is much better not to have backups on the same drive in your laptop.
If that HD crashes, you would be SOL!