Why backing up is important

iwb

My laptop display died a few weeks back. It flickered a few times and that was it. Worse than that, the external display option wouldn't work either. Of course, although I preach about backing up to everyone else, it was at least a month since I did any backup.
I eventually got an adapter to allow me to connect my 2.5" drive to the desktop PC. I bought DriveImage and copied the drive to one on my desktop unit. Large hard drives do come in handy for stuff other than ripping videos:)
By the time I had done all that and found all the necessary software to enable me to keep working while sending the laptop away for repair, I had burned almost a full day. Of course, had the hard drive failed on the machine, I would've been really screwed. I have had problems before where a backup would've saved me but I hadn't done them either.
My new years resolution is to backup religiously. I think I will run a copy of the C drive once a month and in between, do a backup of the My Documents folder and email folders. I have a 512Mb memory key which would probably hold at least all the relevant data in the My Docs folder.
Who out there does this properly? I hope most people who carry their work lives on a laptop are good at backing up. Anyone want to give me the foolproof (and practical) backup strategy?
I connect to my home network most days and work from home most of the time.
Regards, iwb.

Victor

My strategy isn't perfect but it serves my purposes.

I only really care about my documents, not the integrity of the system / machine (not connected to and network / internet).

I have two physically separate drives (one is also partitioned). At the start I copied everything onto the c: drive and then copied that to the e: drive. I then created a "backups" directory on the f: drive and put the "master" into it.

Once a month I search for every document changed in the last month and copy them into a dated directory in the "backups" directory on the f: drive, e.g. today would be backup20031223 (sorts better alphanumerically than backup23122003). Repeat every month.
Every day or two, I will back up that day or two's files onto a zip disk.

For very important files that are changed on an ongoing basis e.g. big spreadsheets I've built up, every few days I create a new document20031223.xls (or whatever file).

Once a month I'll scandisk / defrag everything.

Capt'n Midnight

for quick and nasty backups look at

xcopy *.* X: /s /d /m

This copies all changed files to drive X if they are newer than the ones there already.

tech

Ye guys might think that this is sad, but I run nightly backups on my home network , which consits on 4 pcs which various ppl using them I only backup all the pst files on each pc, all the my docs for all pc's and some other stuff, things like my 200gig mp3 colelction I dont backup, I use a DLT 4000 unit and have 5 tapes and a monthly tape. I use Arcserve 2000 for the backup software ...