Here’s a fruit hanging so low it sometimes touches the ground: buy a big hard drive for backup, and software configured to backup your entire main drive to it at least once a day. It doesn’t have to be a fast drive but make it twice as big as your main drive.
If you’re not set up with something of this sort and you do anything serious or work-related on your computer, stop reading LW right now and go shopping. It’s almost impossible to spend too much on this, compared to the expected value. My baseline credence that you’ll lose data at some point and direly regret it: 80%. Magnitude of the loss: between a few days and a few year’s worth of work. Take your hourly rate and multiply.
If you do photo editing, I agree. If you do not do photo editing, then your most vital files should not be more than few gigabytes in size, in which case, the more convenient solution is backing up to the cloud. You can even sign up to multiple services and add the same files to them for added redundancy. For example, I use Dropbox, Skydrive Sugarsync, multiple google accounts (which can be managed simultaneously on the same computer using InSync) all for free. Some of these services even allow me to recover deleted files or previous versions of them.
The only reason you might still want to back up your entire hard drive is if you are too lazy to reinstall the OS and the applications in the unlikely event your OS crashes, but the inconvenience of regularly backing up is worse IMO.
Edit: You can unsync from some accounts so you can have backup ability to a certain point of time.
This particularly applies when using SSDs. The things just … die, in a way hard disks don’t. You’ll get another one, because they’re that damn cool. But BE BACKED UP.
Here’s a fruit hanging so low it sometimes touches the ground: buy a big hard drive for backup, and software configured to backup your entire main drive to it at least once a day. It doesn’t have to be a fast drive but make it twice as big as your main drive.
If you’re not set up with something of this sort and you do anything serious or work-related on your computer, stop reading LW right now and go shopping. It’s almost impossible to spend too much on this, compared to the expected value. My baseline credence that you’ll lose data at some point and direly regret it: 80%. Magnitude of the loss: between a few days and a few year’s worth of work. Take your hourly rate and multiply.
If you do photo editing, I agree. If you do not do photo editing, then your most vital files should not be more than few gigabytes in size, in which case, the more convenient solution is backing up to the cloud. You can even sign up to multiple services and add the same files to them for added redundancy. For example, I use Dropbox, Skydrive Sugarsync, multiple google accounts (which can be managed simultaneously on the same computer using InSync) all for free. Some of these services even allow me to recover deleted files or previous versions of them.
The only reason you might still want to back up your entire hard drive is if you are too lazy to reinstall the OS and the applications in the unlikely event your OS crashes, but the inconvenience of regularly backing up is worse IMO.
Edit: You can unsync from some accounts so you can have backup ability to a certain point of time.
That’s “something of this sort”. :) On the other hand, you might ask yourself how much time you’d actually lose to a total drive failure.
Happens every morning while I sleep without intervention on my part.
This particularly applies when using SSDs. The things just … die, in a way hard disks don’t. You’ll get another one, because they’re that damn cool. But BE BACKED UP.