Lift Up Your Hearts!

All you Windows 7 users out there, can you help me with backup?  Here's the problem:  Windows 7 thinks it's smarter than I am, and I have my doubts.

I had a fine backup routine in place with Windows XP:

• Every night, I did an automatic incremental backup of my main drive to itself.  I know it's not good to backup to the same drive, but any other system requires having the backup drive plugged in and powered on all the time, which is (1) a waste of energy and (2) risky in itself.  Either that or I'd have to remember to plug it in at the right time.  I know myself better than that.  And this way at least the files were recoverable barring a hard drive crash.
• Once a week, I'd do a full backup of the main drive, this time to an external hard drive.  I keep many levels of backup, spread over multiple external drives.  (I know, I'm obsessive about it, but I've had two levels of backup fail at once before.)
• Also once a week, I'd do an incremental backup of the external drive that is plugged in most of the time and holds much of my data.  I only do a full backup of that one twice a year, as it takes some 15 hours.
• Occasionally I'd do an image backup of the whole primary drive.  (I added this after learning—the hard way—that even though the computer has the "factory settings" built in, you really don't want to go that far back if you can help it.)

The system seems to work well, and it doesn't take much of my time to give me some reassurance.  The computer's time, yes; my time, no.

So ... enter Windows 7 Backup.  As far as I can tell, I can't even specify where I want the backup to go, at any level lower than the entire external drive!  Worse, I can't specify "full" or "incremental"—Windows 7 does a full backup the first time, and then all subsequent backups are incremental, except that, "If you're saving your backups on a hard drive or network location, Windows Backup will create a new, full backup for you automatically when needed" (emphasis mine).

When needed?  How on earth does Windows 7 think it can tell when a full backup is needed?  I, and I alone, determine when a new full backup is needed!

Plus, if Windows is doing incrementals all the time, the backups are going to one drive only, and I really like distributing them over at least two drives.

I'm very new to Windows 7, and I like many of the features, but I do get ticked off when a feature I use all the time gets broken/removed.  I also know that I'm automatically resistent to change, which is often a fault, and that perhaps there's something better about Windows 7 backup that I'm just not seeing yet, which is why I'm writing this post.  Tell me what you like about it, what I'm missing, or how to do it better.

I'd really rather use the built-in system, and not have to resort to third-party software for something that Windows should provide—especially since it used to provide a backup that worked just fine for me.