Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

So, awhile back I wrote about external hard drives, partly because I was interested in performing backups. I also noticed some speed increases when I did backups to my external hard drive, so I decided to look into performing regular backups onto it in additional to the semi-regular backups I do onto DVDs.

Why back up to an external hard drive?

I don't have to waste a DVD every time perform a backup, especially if I am making backups on a daily basis. Plus, the same amount of data can be backed up to my external hard drive in less time.

Note that I still back up to DVDs, since those are more durable and can easily be taking offsite. But those backups are done every few weeks at best, so backups to my external hard drive are done more frequently -- usually every few days.

What is backed up?

Various documents, my photography (I take a lot of pictures), source code for projects I am working on, my Moneydance financial data, and tarred/gzipped backups of websites that I manage.

What is not backed up?

Any movies and music that I have--since those files are static (i.e., they never change), I just burn them to DVD when I have enough content to actually fill a DVD. There's simply no need for me to keep backing them up over and over. Sure, it's nice to have multiple copies of this stuff, but I simply do not have that much of a need for my MP3s. (And it's not like I can't rerip them from my CD collection) Any pictures that are older than a year old are also burned to DVD and removed from my Pictures/ directory, since I am no longer working with them on a day-to-day basis.

McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage

This is a stable product that's been out for many years and has a fairly good reputation. But a single update got botched and now entire filesystems are getting trashed.

I'll also shamelessly plug my own article on backup basics, which can be found here: Backups Made Easy.