This is a huge concern for me since I’ve been screwed over plenty of times, but with those 3.5 inch diskettes to back up on. Yes, the 1.44 MB ones way back in the day! My first “real” backup was a Zip disk with a glorious 100 MB per disk, then came the CDs, DVDs, and giant external hard drives. Now, with a few DVDs and a 300GB external HD, I’m able to backup a significant amount of data and provide somewhat a form of redundancy, but it isn’t a real backup system. It’s just a safety net to make me feel good.
Currently, I’m using my DreamHost‘s Subversion to backup general working files (no pictures and videos). I’m extremely happy with it. I can access it anywhere and even better, work on it whenever and where ever I want without worrying about having the latest files. I just have to follow the rules: update, make my changes, commit, whatever I want: BING, BANG, BOOM!
I’ve talked to James about Mozy to back up my pictures and videos, but I have yet to get it setup. So far, I have only seen the screen shots and setup instructions. It sounds really promising since I have a ton of other things I want to backup. They’re currently sitting in an external hard drive on top of my file cabinet waiting for a huge disaster to come along. You know, spilling something on it, power surge, or just tipping over and corrupting data.
Joseph just got the ridiculous unlimited plan from DreamHost and is sucking up all the bandwidth in his area. He’s putting all his pictures and videos on his FTP and I’ve slightly considered this too. Something just sounds icky about it, so I’d like to get some opinions/suggestions about it.
Whatever I back up on, I’ve got to make sure there’s a back of that back up because Murphy’s Law is always in effect.