Personal backups.

[Jammrock]

Just a curiosity on my part. How often do you backup your data? See the poll.

[High_Jumbllama]

Once a week. I have a backup job created with Powerarchiver for my bookmarks and email. Anything else I have a directory compare copy to an external hard drive.

[Chucky Cheese]

once a week for me!

[az]

I used to not backup anything (lost quite a bit of quite personal photos due to a filesystem failure that way).

Since I've upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I make hourly (for the last 24 hours)/daily(for the last month)/weekly (until the backup HD is full) incremental backups in the background when at home.

This means once a week, mostly, since I take the laptop to work. Maybe I should take the backup drive there as well.

Time Machine (OS X 10.5's backup tool) is the reason to upgrade to 10.5 and is the absolute best consumer backup solution there is (I just wish it supported backups over WiFi and off-site backup). Configuration: Switch it on, that's it. And the retrieval of backed-up data has the most beautiful, easy to use interface I've ever seen, Some might call the effects a bit over the top, though.

Check out a video of how it works.

I would seriously peg Time Machine as a reason to switch to a Mac for people who aren't married to their Windows software. I still use Windows at work and for games, and OS X is by no means perfect, but it is less maintenance-intensive. And it runs Opera

[VJ]

At home, I don't generate enough data to validate a backup on periodic intervals. Most data I have are my music and photos, and they are backed up when they are put on computer (transfer to pc, copy to external harddisk which is then disconnected, and copy to dvd). The OS is backed up as well (images of the harddisk) for easy recovery if things go wrong.

At work, backup happens every night, and I set my system to make sure it happens.

[Helevitia]

There is no option for me.

Any important data I have goes on my NAS in a RAID 5-like(X-RAID proprietary to Netgear)) setup. I also have two 250GB USB HDD connected to the NAS and one backs up the other separate from the X-RAID setup.

I don't "backup" anything from my computer, I just copy files to the NAS when I'm ready to keep them safe(r)

[Jammrock]

Which works well if you're never on the road (or mess with offline folder synch).

Some day I'll get a NAS, but pushing files across a wireless network is no fun.

I switched to daily backups recently (it takes less time if you do it frequently the way tools like Time Machine and Windows Backup work). I go to a 1 TB RAID 0 box over an eSATA connection and use Windows Backup from Vista Ultimate. It keeps a running VHD file with the changes so it only takes 3-10 minutes a day to complete. Once a week I do a complete backup.

Now my really important files, namely my stories, I have backup up on 3 different devices, plus online, and do that whenever I finish doing updates to a story.

[Nowhere]

Gotta...start...doing...backups...

(unfortunatelly I become fairly profficient at preventing data loss, so when it will hit me... )

[ND66]

At work, data is on network drive, backed up every night with a tape drive. We have four sets of tapes, so it takes 4 weeks to overwrite the 1st tape used.

At home, I have 2 external and 1 internal HD’s for my pictures and video storage only. First I copy them to my internal HD, then I copy the same thing to each of those 2 external HD’s, this way I have a triple copy of my personal stuff.

I also have an 80GB Photo Bank External HD (Battery powered HD combined with all kind of Cards reader) that I take with me on vacation to backup the video and pictures every night. Slower4 then crap, but cheap and smallish solution when on the road. I refuse to carry a laptop when vacationing.

.

[Taz]

Nightly backups to a DLT-V4 tape drive using Backup Exec

[Jammrock]

Nightly backups to a DLT-V4 tape drive using Backup Exec

What's this 'tape' think you speak of?

[Dr Mordrid]

Every night. We have a terabyte RAID 0/1 gigabit NAS and all the systems are scheduled to back up their drive image to it at staggered intervals over night. Each system also has a RAID 0/1 or RAID5 'working storage' the contents of which also gets backed up every night, but earlier.

[xortam]

I don't question the elves on how they do their job.