Apple Users

Erase your backup drive and use it as a target drive for Carbon Copy Cloner. It's a free, slick drive mirroring program - it makes a perfect, bit-for-bit copy of one drive onto another. If your primary drive fails, you literally put a new one in, boot off your backup since it's a clone of your main drive, OS and all, and carbon copy back to the new drive. It can be automated to backup on your chosen schedule; it's not QUITE as integrated as Time Machine and lacks some candy like the selective rollbacks, but for a simple, efficient backup system it's probably the best there is

ed - I just noticed the little line at the bottom saying CCC is now commercial, $40. I guess it depends on how badly you want backups...or you can teach yourself how to use Terminal to schedule a cron job that runs dd to clone your primary to the backup, since that's basically what CCC does.