NTBackup is a free backup application that comes with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro (and also runs on XP Home..) that is great for simple stuff. There are a few limitations to it though - you can't do multiple, concurrent backup jobs, you can't set it to delete old backups if the destination drive is getting full, and other bits. One step towards making NTBackup more useful is a free tool called Enhanced Windows Backup that works as a replacement GUI to fix some of the limitations.

Today I had a problem where my FTP client of choice, Panic Software's Transmit, where I changed the server software and any time thereafter SSH connections gave a "Permission Denied" error. As it turned out the problem wasn't permissions but rather the server's SSH identity changed and Transmit was getting confused. A little looking around didn't turn up anything obvious - there was no preferences option to force it to re-validate the identity, it just kept failing.