Glenn Reynolds learns the importance of having a systematic method of backing up important data files,
SOME ADVICE: Suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash on my main computer over the weekend. I had backed up all the directories that matter to a firewire hard drive, and I had separate backups of important stuff, like articles in progress, so the data loss wasn’t awful — but I still lost a lot of stuff that’s important in the aggregate even if not individually.
I’m switching to an automatic full-backup system, as my data-backup habits go back to an obsolete era when I didn’t have nearly so much stuff stored as bits. You may want to think about that yourself, if you haven’t already done so.
Part of the thing that makes backing up so difficult, however, is precisely that so much stuff is stored digitally. It’s one thing to back up a couple hundred megabytes worth of files. It’s another thing to back up a couple hundred gigabytes worth of files.
I use FolderClone to make nightly backups of my files to an external hard drive. Then every weekend I back-up those files to DVDs. That works for now since I’m only backing up about 80 gb of data, but I’ll need to switch to higher capacity discs at some point or it won’t scale (come on 200gb blue-ray discs!)
I have backup sets stored at 5 separate locations, the furthest being about 35 minutes away to hedge somewhat against the possibility of a catastrophe such as fire, flood or tornado.