How often do you backup your data?
Being the first of the month I thought it would be a good idea to backup all my primary partitions, and during that long process I realized I really don’t backup my data often enough. My plan when I built this new system was to do incremental backups 3 times a week and then one full backup on the first of every month. Even though I was able to automate the process I never did because of my varying work hours. I can’t have 50gb of data compressing while I need to work on some things. When I do backups I only backup my OS partition, my settings partition, standalone apps partition and my data partition. The other drives are too large to backup and if I lose the data on them it would suck, but I could live. I think one reason I prefer not to backup the data as often as I wanted is because my data partition, which holds all my personal information, project, and contracts I work on, contains an incredible number of files. When you consider all the files that are created when you checkout a subversion repository on top of the files you work with daily it can get out of hand. That really isn’t a good excuse to not backup data, it is actually a reason to do it more often, so I am really just making up lame excuses as to why I don’t.
How often are you backing up your data?
Would you like to do it more often?
For those of you who have migrated to a different platform, did the platform change your habits any?
I would like to buy a nice NAS to put in my rack, like a 2TB and then I can get rid of some of these other hard drives. LaCie has a really nice 2TB NAS, but it is also expensive. But really, is all your data stored in regular backups worth $1000? Mine sure as hell is!! I am also considering a move to more of a virtualized environment around the house, I have colocated one machine, but I have others to do something with. If I moved all of my development work to a virtualized box and just mapped the folder to my Windows machine I would only have to backup a few files on the host machine.
