For those that do backup your computer (and I'm sure there are a fair few that don't!) - what do you do?

I'm interested coz one guy I know keeps all his files on a separate drive and basically reads them all into his computer from there... some kind of LAN setup or something. So he can actually change computer and all his still be there ready and waiting. He also does backups every night.

Sounds pretty hardcore to me, and totally not necessary (for me). I just save my files once a month or so.

Should I be backing up?


Actually before Christmas I did make a DVD of my photos and a few files I have. Not much else on there really.

I back up everything I have.
I put photos on DVD and onto an external HD.

Then my music...

I record live music at 24 bit so the files are pretty big.
One hour > 1gb = well over 1tb of masters.
Then 1tb+ of just Phish shows!!!! A terrastation of other random shows. All those shows are FLAC'd onto DVD-r as well. Also most of my Phish shows and alot of other shows. I transfered off of DAT so I still have those as well.

So in the end everything gets backed up at least three times + I upload alot of my shows to the Live Music Archive, so there's a fourth, actually a fifth because LMA backs them up as well.

On very important shows I'll back them up on DVD twice using different brands or batches "just in case" I get a bad spindle of discs. Oh and did I mention that a taper friend of mine and I store each others shows on DVD. All my DVD's are at his house, and all his at mine just in case of natural disaster

Everything on external HD at work, backs up automatically every night and I syncronise the D-drives of my work and home pc's about once or twice a week. Wouldn't be much use in case of a "natural disaster" as home and work are about 5 mins apart but my photos are all online at smugmug so somewhere outside Japan. Back up photos to DVD once a year.

About every month or so I backup onto a hard-disk thats about it.

I think work does backups every night, but they would.

I really need to remember to do that regularly. Thanks!

Sounds technical that me jane.... how does an overnight backup work, do you need special software for that?

If google has its way, we wil be using their software for word processing, excel etc so they store your files and look after the backups.

i use it myself for some things, like work files i need when travelling, personal info etc, its quite useful. probably safer than carrying a USB too.

Not so hardcore!! I do exactly that too. I am currently on the lappy (wireless to the network) and my emails and all other files are on the network drive.

What that means is that I can get to my files from here, from the desktop in the office, from the olive press room or from the nice sunny courtyard outside.

It also means that I can backup to the second drive in the network drive enclosure, so fully redundant data.

And, should you be backing up, charlotte? Not if you can live without your data! Could you? I know I couldn't, so I do go a bit OTT!

The auto-backup's bundled with the virus software in Norton 360. You just set which drives/folders you want backed up and to where and specify the time of day. It's pretty easy - just gotta remember to leave the pc on and close all the other programs.
I use logmein.com to sync my home and work pcs.

I used to be very lax but now do a backup once a week.

I have it set to update files once a week on an external drive. I use two, swap them each week.

Same here, but with just one.

I just burn photos or finished artwork to redundant DVD once in a while, but have all files on the main HDD backed up on two different external HDDs. I have a spare boot drive that I update every so often, so if/when the active boot drive crashes, I don't have to go install all the software and related updates all over again.

Ez, that's the sort of thing I'd be doing if I had mission critical (ie money m,aking) stuff on the box. As it is, most of what I have is, if not replaceable, at least live-without-able.

I back all my data to a pair of external HDD's. Unfortunately they live within a few metres of the machine so a fire would clean me out. So my "totally can't be lost business files" are also backed up to a machine I have on the Internet. Having said that I'd be very sad to lose my piccies so I should save them somewhere off site too.

Some useful geeky stuff:

• HDD's are like like light bulbs. They all die. I've blown two on this laptop, one under warranty. Ok, I was unlucky, but it does happen.
• DVD's aren't a good long term medium because the recording layer detoriates. Not to mention death by scratches.
• For those of you who have Macs running Leopard check out Time Machine. A bit limited but it what it does do is awesome. It keeps versions and for recovering from hdd failures it can't be beaten.
• Windows has an Ok backup tool that keeps versions too, not as easy to use as Time Machine though.

Has anyone tried the internet based backup systems? I'd be interested to know how well they work out.

Ezorisu, have you heard of mirroring? If you are up to it geek wise you could easily mirror your main and backup drive using a Raid 1 HDD Controller (now cheap for IDE and SATA drives) to control both your drives.

The beauty of using a hardware solution is that if either of your drives fails your computer will still boot and run as normal. When your machine is next powered off you can replace the failed drive.

My SATA host controller has RAID control built in.

English please....!