Regarding your Automator question...
The attached file should help you out. I use it to back up my Development folder every day. I have the workflow saved as an application, and I use CronniX to schedule the app to run each day at a specific time.
The workflow backs up the folder to a location on an external hard drive (you will see it referenced in the last step in the workflow - "MyFiles" is the volume name of the drive). The workflow also adds the date and time to the backup, and turns the whole thing into a disk image, to keep everything neat and tidy.
You are going to want to change the following things in the workflow.
Step 1: Change the dialog text to whatever you want.
Step 2: Change the "Where" field. Leave the "Name" field as is.
Step 3: Change the specified finder items to whatever you want. You can include multiple folders in here. The end result will be that those folders will all be in the disk image that is created and named at the end.
Step 5: Change the image name and location.
Step 8: Change the place where the finder items are moved to (this is the folder on whatever disk you are backing up to).
Step 9: Change the path to the Temp folder. This is the location that you set in Step 2.
Step 11: Change the text of the dialog to whatever you want. This is the message that displays when the backup is complete. You can also remove this step (and you can remove Step 1, as well, if you like).
