Best way to create a scheduled back-up

[born2bongo]

I been manually copying all my documents to an external hard-drive for backup, but thought I would like to find a way to have one run on a schedule.

I started with the backup and restore center but it wouldn't let me connect to the external drive because it is on a Windows XP system. I've read up about this and someone has posted a hack on another forum but my husband is not willing to allow the network to be used like this.

Is there a script or something that I can borrow and amend to just copy the folders on my laptop to the hard drive, overwriting the previous version, that I can put on a schedule? Basically it will do what I've been doing manually when I've remembered.

I really don't like Vista at all but I'm stuck with it. I only hope someone at Microsoft remembers what happened to IBM when they got too smug