I expect most of my readers already have at least a minimal backup system in place (you do, don’t you?), but for anyone else who stumbles onto this blog, here’s a good primer for Windows and Mac systems. (People running Linux, have patience, it’s coming. EDIT, 2011-07-03: it’s here.)
Believe me, if you don’t have a backup system in place, you will regret it.
Since I hate the idea of dedicating most of my hard drive to backups that are running every hour or so, which really puts a lot of wear and tear on the drive, on a Mac I use Carbon Copy Cloner. A free program that is better in some ways than Time Machine. (It can, on a Mac, even produce a bootable backup!)
I have git code repositories on my server, which I update after each code change (sometimes several times an hour), so full copies of my work are always on at least two different drives.
I also use a network-attached storage system to backup both my main system and the server. It has two large drives set up as mirrored RAID (to hopefully prevent any loss from a drive failure), and I update it at least once a week. Every so often I copy its entire contents to one of my USB drives, take that drive to a secure off-site location, and bring back the previous backup drive.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the design, and setting it up, and I think it protects my data fairly well from hardware failure, hardware theft, natural disaster, and even the possibility of user error on my part. 🙂
How do I back up my computer? I didn’t know it had a reverse gear!
Check out the URL. 😀