While I'm not old enough to remember when a 2 GB hard drive was big, I am old enough to remember thinking that a 20 GB was.
Well I finally got a complete backup process at home... I have 1TB, for the non technical that is about 1000 GB's, of hard drive space in use... and what amazes me is that I know that in 2 years I'll need more.
So just in case you care about the setup:
1. I have a 465 GB external hard drive that acts as the heart of my system. It has a copy of everything on it.
2. I back my laptop up to two external hard drives. So I can have two hard drives fail and still not lose anything that I am actively using.
3. Files that I'll likely never use again are put in an archive folder and are also copied to the primary hard drive of an old PC that is just sitting in my house using electricity.
4. Then I have a folder of home movie files that I copy to the slave drive on the old PC (it has 232GB's of space, so it won that honor).
5. Next I back up a 'semi-archived' folder I have that holds projects that I generally only touch two or three times a year so I don't want them on my laptops hard drive. So this is copied from my primary external hard drive to my secondary external hard drive.
6. This website... the setup pulls the files from this site down to my master external drive so if anything happens to this server I have a safe backup of this as well.
7. This website... I use Visual Studio 2005 for my development and I have a 'publish' folder... I created a profile that moves this folder up to the server so this site always has my latest work on it.
The software that makes all this possible?
SyncBackSE. I generally don't buy much software, as I can generally get away with the free versions available to me, but this is well worth the piddly $30 they charge for it.
The only thing I have left to backup is my wife's PC. But she only has two things on it worth backing up and if we lost either it wouldn't be critical. So I plan on setting that up after the new year. So I can archive our financial data for the previous year first.
Now in an ironic twist, learned on Thursday of a friend who had a hard drive crash... while a mutual techie friend has been able to retrieve some of the data (last I heard), but still has the potential of losing bits and pieces of 3 years of critical data. So if you're not backing up your stuff, you are playing with fire!