I know, but last I checked draco ore spawned, albeit rarely, down at diamond level unless you're in The End, in which case it's more common. Same for emeralds in terms of the overworld, unless these have been changed specifically for the pack.
Nope, not Thaum. These shards are apparently some kind of analog to Magical Crops, and they appear any time I try to find ways to make a material in NEI. All their entry says about how to get them is that "Neutral Clusters" spawn underground and that you need to break them. They do have their own oredictionary name though, so I'm assuming that they just don't appear in the places I've looked.
AromaBackup has had A LOT of memory leak/buffer/etc issues in the past, whether you change the timing on it's backups or not. Besides, there are a lot of things in place already to make sure you don't lose stuff if something crashes, and I can backup manually if I need to.