It's been years since I've backed up my laptop (Windows 7).

What are you guys using? Silverlight? AOMEI? Easier the better.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

I use Ghost 11.x (or something like that - DOS based). I just pull the drive and make an image of it from time to time.

I used to use a free networked backup program that would run in the background on a schedule. It worked great (had a mushroom as the icon - someone will know what it is).

Edit:
Cobian is the mushroom:
http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

 

Online backup I like: Online Data Backup - Offsite, Onsite, & Cloud - CrashPlan Backup Software (it's cheaper than properly lifecycling your own backup drives)

Imaging backup: Best backup software for data protection and disaster recovery can do backups and restores on external drives, network drives, etc. Can run with Windows online or from boot disk, it's an awesome util.

If you're just wanting to sync data to a disk instead of a full image, just use Syncback, 2BrightSparks | SyncBackFree, SyncBackSE, and SyncBackPro
the free version will work fine for syncing data between discs. Just be careful you don't sync the blank backup folder over your data.

 

Lately I've been running anything I directly type into as a vm. It makes lots of things easier, especially backups. For the easiest start try virtual box from oracle, or VMware has a free version but requires root install.

 

I ended up using Macrium Reflect. I heard good things about Acronis.