Close the Launcher. Replace the Launcher Items folder that was previously removed. You will hear disagreement on this because Iomega has a bad reputation for reliability, but I have had very good luck backing up to Jaz disks with Retrospect from Dantz. They are 2-GB removeable disks, and so it would take maybe two, probably, to back up all your data. I used to use tape drive, which worked fine, but is much slower.
Many people strongly prefer tapes for backup.
They are inexpensive, dependable, and large. You could get tapes that would back up your whole drive in one go, so you could just let it run unattended overnight. I experience periodic freezes on my iMac. Many of them are associated with Outlook Express version 4.x., though it does tend to have a Finder freeze on other occasions. It almost always hangs if I try to activate the PalmPilot Hot Synch software which I normally have disabled but enable whenever I want to hot synch my data.