First rule of effective backup

Backup is important -- everyone knows it, but for backup to be really effective, it must be done regularly. While doing repetitive tasks can be very hard and error prone for us humans, computers simply excel at this, so the first rule of effective backup is:

Backups should be automatic, with as little human intervention as possible. Corollary: Unless you have a tape changer, don't use tape for backup because you'll need a human to change the tapes (and they'll forget to do it) I'll post several solutions I use which follow this rule