How do you backup your valuable files at home?

What started as trying to find a good way to back stuff up has turned into a digital housecleaning extravaganza that I'm now on Day Two of.  I'll think to myself, where was that thing I did?  Like the all-text fantasy RPG I was working on a year or two ago where I was hoping to create emergent narrative by giving each character their own goals and strategies.  I did accidentally create prostitution in the process, which was neat.  Last night I realized that I'd lost the source.  Turned out it was on a hard-drive in my desktop that wasn't actually plugged in.

Oh yeah, and old e-mail.  I've got e-mail dating back to 1995.  But I seem to be missing a stretch from 1997 to 2001.  Maybe it's on the laptop.

So I have not one, but two, problems:

How to backup more data than will fit on a CD?  Hard-drives are happily very reliable, so I was thinking maybe I'll just backup everything from the desktop to the laptop, but if there's a fire then I'll probably lose both machines.  So backing up to CD's that I can keep in the fridge (stuff in the fridge tends to survive a fire, I hear) would be my preferred option.  Or online backup, if I could find one that was super-cheap, which I haven't. 

Organizing all my freaking data so it's convenient to backup. 

And everything has to be convenient enough so that I'll actually do it on a regular basis.

Actually, my wife's digital photos are the real problem - spread all over the place and huge.

So - um - what do you guys do?  If anything?

Comments

[Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk]

I take it that you don't have a DVD burner (or if you do, there's still more stuff to be backed up than will fit on a DVD-R). Either way, generally I'll just burn a set of CDs, making sure to label them by date and number in the set. Afterwards I bundle them together (interestingly, by wrapping them in paper and then taping it, like a gift), and set them aside in my desk drawers.

As for the organization issue, the simple "My Whatever" directories that Windows has is a good start. Beyond that, think hierarchy. Work out a tree of all the content you have, and then build it. Make sure to use shortcuts/links in your root documents directory to the content you access frequently, so that you won't blow it.

As for other people's content about my machine, that's pretty easily solved. Don't let anyone else use your computer. :D

[Mark]

I wrote this on that topic a while back:
http://blogs.linux.ie/stuff/2004/10/24/backing-up-slacking-off/

I'm currently using Dantz Retrospect to backup all the systems at home to an external hard drive attached to one of the machines. It's quick to back up to and restore from, network speed allowing, and you can always use the drive for traditional storage later should you trade up.

[zachary j. gamedesigner]

Burn dvd-/+Rs and put them in a fire safe.

[Nabil]

I have a book of CDs of all my images burned in monthly increments (often more than one disk, depending on how active I've been). Then at the end of the year, I burn a DVD (or two... or three...) of that year's content, and put it in a fire safe. That way I have redundancy. It may seem a little overkill, but anyone who has ever actually had a hard drive irrecoverably fail will probably say it's not even enough.

That's my best suggestion concerning your wife's images, in particular. Prepping the files for burning each month will also encourage better filing habits, rather than saving them all over the place willy-nilly.

[Len Holgate]

I have several USB/firewire external hard disks. I have a batch file that does an xcopy to a dated directory. I run the batch file every so often and rotate the disks so that I have one on the desk, one in my safe and one in my dad's safe. I started with 20gb lacie drives which are nice and small but now have a couple of 160gb Maxtor one touch drives (I dont use the software that comes with them). I used to use tape, then CDs and then DVDs but none of them are as usable as the external drives. I still burn the odd DVD of essential stuff just in case but generally it's too much of a pain trying to work out what will fit on the disk, or too time consuming to do disk spanning. With the external drives I just plug in, run the batch file and leave it to it.

[Adam Vandenberg]

DVD burner herem, though even 4.7GB is starting to feel cramped. I have a dual-layer burner, but it's only recently that blank discs have come down in price ($2 each in bulk.) The problem with the dual layer discs is that they're write-once, and I usually don't quite have 8GB of new stuff to back up in one shot.

I have a hard time trusting external hard drives as back up devices, as my dad has had problems with a couple different brands.

[Paul]

Since you're doing the life organization/inventory thing anyway- you should read Getting Things Done by David Allen.

[Pag]

I use SyncBack (it's free!) to sunchronize all my important data with an external hard drive. I've used Windows scheduler to set it up so that it starts a backup as soon as I leave the computer inactive for 15 minutes. That way, if my hard drive crashes I lose a few hours of work at most and I have absolutely nothing to do to keep backups up to date (one of my problems was that I was always too lazy to actually do the backups).

A note about fire safes: most of them are made for paper. Stuff in it may heat up quite a bit during a fire, but it shouldn't catch fire. The problem is that CDs and DVDs can become damaged with much less heat that it takes to make paper catch fire. There are some safes that are certified safe for CDs and such, but they cost a bundle and are harder to find.

--
Food for thought on game development: http://sacredcows.pagtech.com/

[Martin Donlon]

The more redundancy the better, try and adopt processes that encourage it. For instance I use IMAP for storing my mail and I set my mail clients to save local copies of messages from the server, so I have copies of all my mail on my IMAP server, my work computer, my home computer and my laptop. None of these copies are considered "backups", its just a useful side-effect of the process. Using CVS, subversion, etc for your source code, even for short little experiments that might not necessarily warrant version control, it only takes a few seconds to add a new directory to source control. Again the way I work helps to increase redundancy. I usually us my home PC for longer coding sessions, but I also use my laptop for browsing source or small experiments while watching TV or whatnot. So again I have copies on the CVS server, my PC and my laptop and again I don't really consider any of these as backups, just useful redundancies.

[Jass]

I have been using IBackup for the past
6 years, the service has been reliable and is user friendly. They have multiple
applications like a network drive, scheduling application, web browser based access
etc. The price is just 9.95 US$ for 5GB of space.

http://www.ibackup.com

[Jesus_Smith]

I use ZenOK Online Backup 2011 (has a free antivirus) I paid $34 for a year of service to safe all my important data with it:)

http://onlinebackup.zenok.com/