It has recently come to my attention that despite many of our members being highly-intelligent, in the upper echelon of the tech-savvy, and having on average decent common sense, they do not back up their data. In case there's any confusion on the point of this topic, let me be clear:

BACK UP YOUR DATA
Even if it's going to cost you money to buy a hard drive. Even if you're lazy. Even if you don't think your projects/documents/etc are worth backing up. DO IT. You will regret it if you don't.

With that point made clear, let me move on to some suggestions about how to back up data, taken from my own experiences. I would also appreciate if other people would post up their backup setups. I personally consider the contents of my laptop to be my primary data of interest, since I use its Documents folder as the Documents folder on my desktop via the magic of network shares. If something is valuable, it's in C:\Users\[myusername]\. Pictures, Documents, even AppData, since that's where my Trillian (IM and IRC) logs reside. Therefore, I run a program called SyncBack that performs a daily backup without any necessary intervention from me. My desktop has an FTP server and four hard drives, so once a day SyncBack connects to FTP and intelligently backs up any new or modified files from the past 24 hours. I also have a SyncBack instance on my desktop, which daily takes that backup and copies it from one drive to the other three drives, so that at any point I have at least one backup of my laptop that is no more that 24 hours old, and at least four backups that are no more than 48 hours old. At one point I also had a 2GB SD card permanently hot-glued into my laptop's SD card slot, to which the most important folders in my Documents folder, including /SDK/ and /DCS6Dev/, were backed up every 2 hours.

The most important thing about backing up is to make sure that your data is safe, and that it's up to date. If your system involves manual backup, over time you are going to get lazy, and your backups will be further and further out of date. You will drop a computer, a hard drive will fail, or something will spill, and you'll kick yourself for not having kept them up to date. Therefore, go for an automated solution; SyncBack has worked well for me for about five years now. At one point I didn't have backups, and I came very close to losing about 6 years of documents. Luckily I was able to rescue most of them, but I learned my lesson. My next plan is to try to colocate one of my desktop's disks, so in case something catastrophic like a fire occurs at my apartment and my desktop and laptop are consumed, I will have an offsite backup.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Details about your setup?

I'm incredibly lazy with my backups. The best I do is separate external drives for my major space takers. Mostly photos but I do have a drive for Documents and Applications. I keep my music on my laptop but it is auto-syned via Time Machine to a partition of my Document drive.

Well, don't be lazy. If you have to be lazy, then be lazy after you set up a scheduled, regular backup that's going to at least once a week back up your irreplaceable photos. Rule of thumb: have at least two copies of everything (on different drives, obviously).

Well said, and I saw a similar problem on Omnimaga for the past years. Despite reminding people to backup often after someone lost his project, new people would join and do the same errors. Earlier this year, I stickied a topic, which the title is written in all-caps, in the Other calculator projects and ideas section, explaining why it's important to backup. In my case, it's more calc-related than computer-related, though, so it mostly says to copy your calc files on the computer or another calculator regulary after making some progress.

If you didn't visit the old Omnimaga board on Invisionfree, you have no idea how much projects died due to data loss there... (even PURE BASIC projects where the author played a random ASM game like Bubble Bobble in the middle of development and did not bother resetting the RAM once he was done).

Also a good idea, and the same general rules apply; I was thinking more about several people on IRC who have tried resizing partitions, or have had hard drives crash.

My worst story along those lines is when I had to remake the same three BASIC games three separate times, because the first two times I left my calculator APD'd in MirageOS when I plugged in my silver link, leading to a prompt crash as MirageOS tried and failed to handle the link activity.

I've been saving around $150 for a good terabyte external, but I've seen terrible reviews for every hard drive I've looked at, so I'm a little skiddish.

*Skittish. A 1TB external? That sounds like a lot of money to pay for a 1TB drive; I think a bare drive and an enclosure together shouldn't set you back more than a Benjamin.

I have three active hard disks on my desktop. Two of them are dedicated back-ups. If one back-up fails, it's likely the other will still be intact.

My primary disk is encrypted and compressed; so should a part of the disk ever become corrupted, it might be impossible to salvage any data from it. It's especially important to have back-ups around in this scenario.

I infrequently make CD/DVD data discs of my most crucial data, just to err on the side of caution. It's possible my desktop could be struck by lightning, frying all three of my drives simultaneously.

Exactly, that's an excellent backup scheme, Zera. I don't know if having your primary compressed and encrypted is the best idea backup-wise, but I'll assume you have your reasons.

Well, it depends on the interfaces you want, whether I'm also buying an eSATA ExpressCard, and how shock-protected/portable of a drive I'm getting. Right now I'm strongly considering the LaCie RuggedXL.

Ah, that makes sense. I hope that does the trick; be sure to let us know if you do indeed get it.

Yay! Backup saved my life! a dcs lib in TI-Mail reseted my RAM (my fault and TI-Mail was deleted) and luckly I had a backup on my computer

Just to piss off anyone who attempts to view the contents of my HD. Someday, I might do something illegal just so computer forensics can be defeated.

I don't actually have anything worth hiding. Computer privacy is just something that really interests me, even though I have no practical application for it.

I think modern computers should be equipped with some kind of encryption support right out of the box, whether hardware-level or software. It's becoming an everyday risk mitigation; like wearing a seat-belt. You don't anticipate being involved in a car accident, but you prepare just in case. Computers are similar territory. You hear all these stories about teenagers having naughty photos on their phone's Flash card, or some zombie computer unwittingly participating in an illegal pornography ring; and let's not forget the war on piracy. Although my ISP could be subpoenaed to reveal my participation in peer-to-peer networks, no one would be able to confirm the contents of my HD.

You never know what sort of data that lies dormant on your HD could be used to extort you. Did you browse 4chan a few years ago, and stumbled upon some content that you shouldn't have? It's too bad that cached data might still exist in some form or another. Never fear: Full-volume encryption has you covered.

Huh, you actually make a decent point for full-volume encryption. How is the speed on it, though? Can you see any performance hits or slowdown from having an encrypted volume? I feel like decryption overhead could hurt you.

I haven't noticed any decrease in performance. If you were running a legacy computer, (we're talking Pentium III or slower) you might see slightly longer loading times. Bearing in mind, I'm only running on a Sempron 1.6 GHz. That's AMD's Celeron-class processor. I'm also using a cascading encryption, which you would think would decrypt much more slowly than standard AES.

After compressing my primary drive on top of an existing encryption layer, then I started to notice a slight decrease in performance. It takes slightly longer to load files that are already compressed. (e.g., MP3s)

I back up everything that's difficult to replace (eg music and project files) roughly every week to my external with Create Synchronicity, which then typically lives someplace separate from my machine. It's not quite an offsite backup, but there's a bit more protection than having the backups on an internal drive.

Theft/equipment damage are at least as dangerous to your data as disc failure- I fear for those of you backing up only to drives internal to your machines.

Yeah, that's why I'm uncomfortable about the fact that all my backup drives are local. There's always the concern of bandwidth if I put my backup remotely, but I'm not terribly worried about that.

*bump* By the way, I apparently did not make it clear that SyncBack isn't limited to FTP; that's just my setup. It can easily back up to another internal drive, or to an external drive, or to another computer on the network. It also has lots of features for limiting what files and folders get backed up, and if you do an aggregate backup (keep files on the backup that were deleted in the source) or a synchronized backup (delete files on the backup when they're deleted on the source).

If you don't like the idea of SyncBack, then don't use it, but no matter what you choose, BACK UP YOUR DATA!!

BACK UP YOUR DATA
Seriously.
Back up your calc programs to groups. Back up your groups to your computer. Back up your computer to an external drive or remote server.

BACK UP YOUR DATA

thanks for the info installing and setting up now

Awesome, let me know if you have any questions.