thoughts on backup
Backing up a library of music files is an easy case. Those files don't change much after they are ripped and tagged.
Different threats of data loss require different prevention mechanisms. I was concerned about theft, a house fire and to a lesser extent, human error and malware threats.
I keep two generations of backups: one is at the far end of our house from our computers. I run a new backup about once a week. The other backup generation is at a friend's house. We have lunch together about once a month and exchange backup generations. These backups give me two snapshots from the most recent 30 days (roughly.) Incremental backups are fine for this purpose and take about one minute for the music files and one minute for the rest of that dedicated music PC's files. These two generations also include backups of my general purpose PC, my wife's PC. Incremental backups for those PC usually take 30 minutes for each PC.
I also keep an simplified archive of my music files. Whenever I add new music files to my permanent library, I run the archive program and it copies new files to a USB drive. Each file is captured as it was after I added tags and imported it. Any corrections that I make later will be missing but the audio content of a music file doesn't change after I rip a CD.
I also have a copy of my permanent library on my general purpose PC. I play with beta versions of the player software on this machine. That library would be a decent starting point for recovery if I needed it.
I use the robocopy command line program that is part of Windows 7 and was available in a resource kit for XP. I have command line switches for different backup and restore scenarios.
There are many backup/restore programs for Windows; take your choice.
One other thing: Until you have gone through the recovery process, you really don't know whether it will work.
Bill