I have recently become painfully aware of the importance of backing up computers. I myself experienced hard drive failure during the end of last semester, and a close friend of mine just lost everything this weekend.
Don't think that it'll "never happen to you", because it probably will. Despite the fact that modern technology works marvels to prevent data loss, bad things still happen to good people. Your drives may be old, they may be poor quality, or you may have jostled your laptop just a tad too much - it doesn't matter why, it's just plain devastating when it happens.
And it's preventable. There are so many products out there that can save your digital life. Apple's Mac OS X Leopard even has automatic backup software, called Time Machine, built right in. All you need is an extra hard drive to back up to. Best of all, if you look in the right places, hard drives are dirt cheap these days (i.e. a 500GB drive for $60, or these others).
It's really easy to set up, you don't need to have it plugged in all the time, and you can still use the backup drive to store other things.
So don't let me say, "I told you so!".
August 10, 2008
Back Up!
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Don't forget there are also some nice Internet services that do backups off-site. The big advantage of off-site is that it insures against 'bad' things like losing both your computer and backup hard disk at the same time. It isn't hard to think of different ways this can happen -- small apartment fire, dorm room burglarized, dropped laptop while out and then find your backup disk croaked the very same moment. (I've seen variations on all of these over the years.)
So what's the Internet backup service? I recommend (and use, but have no financial interest in) Mozy.com. They have a free version for up to 2 GB, and an unlimited home use version for $4.95 a month. Runs on Macs and Windows. You can configure it to work in different ways. I have mine running only when my system has been idle for a while, which isn't often, so it reminds me when it hasn't been able to do a backup for a couple days.
The first backup takes a while, but then incremental backups are much quicker.
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