I purchased an external hard drive case to house a 40GB hard drive I had spare so I wanted to try a backup application and I chose Karen Kenworthy's Replicator:
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp
The brand name is UNYKA and it cost me $25.00 and came with a small installation manual, mounting screws, CD driver for Win9X, power adapter, USB cable, screwdriver and 1 bag of desiccant (Dangerous, no eating)
The case is polished aluminum with black plastic end caps and a plastic holder for holding the case vertical but I prefer to lay it flat and it uses USB 2.0 connection.
I powered it up and as it was already Formatted NTFS I deleted the things I didn't want on it then ran the Replicator application to backup My Documents and a couple of other Folders which went smoothly and quickly.
The whole process was very painless.