Gavin,
Yes, I have a network drive (NAS = Network Access Storage) set up as a RAID-1 system (1 TB drive is the Master, and a duplicate 1 TB drive is the Shadow drive) I store "My Documents" on the NAS drive. Any time anything gets written to My Documents, it is immediately copied to the Shadow drive. The only problem with the NAS drives is that they are pretty slow. If I want to access a file from My Documents, it takes a few seconds delay to get the file and load it.
Also, your 74 GB drive is pretty small by today's standards. I would recommend nothing smaller than 500GB, and a 1 TB or 2 TB is preferred, and are not that much more expensive. My 5 year old PC has a 500GB drive that I had to replace about 6 months ago, and unfortunately the Window Backup would not work to restore the latest backup to my new replacement drive...:angry: Fortunately, I had nearly all my data backed up on several different sources, so I was able to get all my important stuff back and about 98% of the less important stuff...:grin: But it did take me about 3 weeks to find and restore everything.
Just as an example...I am only using 49 GB of my 500GB "C" drive but the My Documents folder that I moved to the NAS drive is using up over 594GB of my 1 TB NAS drive. I keep a lot of my active documents in folders on my desktop so they load faster, and I will occasionally copy them to My Documents folder on the NAS drive as a safety net.
Since my hard drive crashed about 6 months ago, I keep 2 and 3 copies of everything....And I also purchased a really good backup program and I will never rely on the Window Backup to work. I even have a software program that monitors temperature and errors on my disks for and will inform me if it detects any potential problems before any of my hard drives goes out. The software only works on the drives connected to the PC and does not see the NAS drives since they are connected to the Network and not the PC.
...Rich