Win7 "Sync" Question

I have desktop computers in our home office and my shop, along with a laptop. All are running Win7 Home Premium. They are interconnected via a wireless router (Belkin). I have a 1TB backup drive attached to the router via a USB port. When I think about it, I copy data files from each of my three computers to folders on the backup drive. I've used Briefcase to sync some of my data files to a thumb drive, but it seems clunky and the system goes into "Not Responding" mode when I try to do the same onto the 1TB drive. When I start "Sync Center", it doesn't recognize the 1TB drive and tells me the no sync partnerships can be set up on this computer. What I'd like to do is set up all of my computers with some type of software that will copy (not compress or encrypt) to the backup drive only the files I have changed or added without me having to remember what I've done. I'm not interested in using any of the online backup services.

Suggestions?

I don't have any suggestions for you Bill, but I'll be watching this thread because I'm looking for a better local backup solution myself.

CNET has several free backup software options, but I don't want to dive into one of those if someone here has experience with something else. It's kinda sad that, as usual, MicroSoft includes "Sync Center" that should do everything I want, but it doesn't work.

I've tried window sync and a few others in the past and didn't find one that really worked well, so will be curious to see what others suggest.

I now use dropbox and copy.com for files I want to keep synced between my computers. Our two main computers I keep carbonite on to backup them up. I've considered paying for the carbonite home+, which lets carbonite backup to a local drive in addition to the sync with it's online backup.

So far, all the free backup products I've seen on CNET and other places are either trialware that just teases you with what you could have if you spent $40, or "Lite" software that doesn't do what I want it to do. Right now I'm using the free version of Memeo that came with one of my USB external drives. It says it's working, but I don't have a real good way to verify it because it's storing everything in a proprietary format. I'm particularly interested in backing up my system partition, but it's not easy to confirm it's a good backup without wiping my current system partition and recovering from backup.

I think what we want and think the win op system and home backhp systems to do is a little more than the designers intended.
For the same reasons and more that you have Bill, i ended up building a server and running windows home server on it.
Someone needs to be the file manager on the network and take control of backups and thats where the server comes in.
But i am not anywhere near setup the way i want yet.
I think this requirement you have was the intended purpose for win home server.
You may want to take a look at it and run it on one of your machines. There is a ton more u can do with it i wont clog this thread by spelling all out here.Suffice to say its very cheap for the power it offers.
You can get whs 2011 for $50 thats what i paid.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ESTMATCH&Description=whs+2011&N=-1&isNodeId=1


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I have used this at my work on windows 7. The description is confusing because of the comparison with Norton Ghost but the backup part actually works great.
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

Another nice free software is Macrium Reflect. This is good for imaging partitions or Hard drives.
http://www.macrium.com/pages/downloads.aspx
You will have to select "Free" in the download agent.