I've been using Acronis TrueImage for years and have no complaints.
Where Ghost and TrueImage come into their own is system recovery and migration. They are "image backup" tools, which means they make a map of your entire drive, and can restore to that exact position in time. Apple's Time Machine works on the same basis afaik.
I've been able to swap out failing hard drives and pick up where I left off in under an hour. I also once recovered from a virus I got from a friend's site that had been hacked, again in no time at all.
That said, I agree with Angry Guy - if you don't need that level of protection they are a bit overkill. I do straight file backups as well by simply dragging and dropping to another drive as well as system backups using TrueImage, and to a different drive as well.
Microsoft do a tool called SyncToy, which is actually rather good for file backups. Set a target (your My Documents folder) and a destination (where your backups live) and it can work out which files need to be moved and which to be overwritten (if you want) to make sure your backup is synced to your main folder. TBH I tend to just drag and drop and overwrite everything every time, but if you have a lot of files to backup SyncToy can be very useful.
The ZIP file isn't entirely necessary IMO, given that it's actually more expensive to get a flash drive or SD card with less than 4GB these days, and even a large Word file is usually < 2MB. You should have more than enough space without needing to compress.