Do You Have Backups?

A friend of mine just recently lost his hard drive. It was his laptop hard drive which luckily didn’t have much important data on it. I was shocked when he said he was thankful it wasn’t his desktop system because he would have lost a lot of data. I thought it was crazy that he didn’t have backups. I am anal about my backups. My backups even have backups. In fact next weekend I am due to create another backup.

My backup plan works like this.

I have a 500 GB NAS (network attached storage) that stores a copy of everything that is irreplaceable, or hard to get back. It includes a copy of all my pictures, and my complete music library. It would be a pain in the ass to have to re-rip all of my CDs. So that gives me two copies of everything at home. Then every six months I burn a DVD with all my pictures on it and bring it to work. I have a stack of DVDs in my locker at work. Each one contains my entire photo collection at that time. So if any of the DVDs go bad, I still have many copies off all my pictures. The only think I don’t store off site yet is my music library. It’s just to much of a pain in the ass to burn 45 GB to disks. I should get another external hard drive for my music library, but it’s only music. If our house burns down, the music can be replaced. The pictures can’t. That is why I am very diligent about backing up my pictures.

Do you have a backup plan? If not, go and make backups now.