Why aren't you backing up your data?

[Vlad!]

A friend recently lost data...again. I asked her why she didn't have backups and she said "I don't know".

So for those of you who are living on the edge, why don't you have backups? I'm just curious, since I work in the data storage industry so to me, backups seem obvious.

[bloop]

1) Don't think to do it.

2) Given what's on my hard drive, do I really want two copies I have to destroy? 

I do backup my school laptop's hdd pretty regularly.  That's a lot of tests to remake.

[enemy anemone]

basically the lack of a system and organization and the lack of one big huge giant backup location keeps me from backing things up regularly. I have various old crap backed up on two external drives, but I have to delete stuff from them before I can back up very much newish stuff (mainly way more photos than I need to be keeping). then I get distracted with "did I already save this?", "do I need to keep this or not?", and "ohhhh so that's where that was!", so it takes forever and I don't do it very often. :\

with some smallish things (like purchased pdfs), I keep a copy in my gmail account. if it had been sent to me, of course I save it, but if not, I upload it as an attachment and save it in a draft. it's probably silly how I am almost religious about doing this, but hey.

[Vlad!]

Bloop:
I think your first point is one of the toughest ones to overcome. Backing up your files is like gardening: it takes a bit of effort at first, but then you can install automatic sprinklers and stuff to make your job easier. Even so, you still need to check from time to time to make sure your plants aren't dead.

jwz (of Netscape fame) wrote what is quite possibly the most useful backup strategy for people who don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about backups. Personally, I don't worry about the offsite backup, mostly because I don't like to think about things that destroy my house. Denial for the win.

(I know others who use the "lots of smallish hard drives" approach, and it's maddening. One possible solution is a SLUG or Drobo or similar, and another is to just buy a 1TB drive and not have to worry about it for a while.)

(I don't use the jwz approach; I'll describe my backup strategy later).

[Vlad!]

Before I completely forget, here's my home backup strategy:

I built a fileserver running a RAID-5 with 320gb disks; currently it has a capacity of 1.2tb, but I can increase it up to 2.2tb. This server (named 'ark') holds backups from all my other computers. I have a script which runs nightly to back up my desktop. It also holds rips of all my DVDs (these aren't mirrored anywhere, but since they're copies of discs I own then it doesn't bother me that they're not backed up, since if I lose them I can just re-rip them all).

I built a RAID server because I was going to work in the storage industry so I thought it would be a good learning experience. I'm glad I did it, though the jwz method is more practical and less expensive. For those considering a home RAID solution, keep in mind that RAID is not backup, and just because you have redundancy and single-disk failure protection doesn't mean you can get away with having only one copy of your data.