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Critical to me is a backup plan/app that does not use proprietary formats. Because backup apps come and go all the time. And your compressed/encrypted/proprietary backup may not be restorable when you need it. Because they stopped updating their software around Windows 7 and it won't run on newer OS'es and the company has long since gone out of business. I also don't like that many backup apps try to be smart and not backup "uneeded stuff". Like, they'll skip all temporary files. Which to THEM, might mean anything that ends in .tmp. But for ME, because a file ends in .tmp does not mean that I don't want to back it up. Backup software making assumptions like this is not good IMHO.
Also critical to me is to not have just an "image" backup. Where you have to restore the whole thing. When you only want to restore a single file or two. Images are OK when you're doing a bare metal restore because your computer caught on fire. The problem there is that you buy a new computer, do the restore, but Windows won't run because it now sees it's on different hardware and assumes you pirated it. So while I do image backups of my wife's Windows computers, I also do file backups separately. On my Linux computers, this is not an issue. But despite images working fine on new hardware under Linux, I typically only do file backups. Because it's quicker for me to reinstall Linux from scratch than it is to restore an image of a pre-existing installation.
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