Protecting Important Data
My recipe for not losing important stuff on my home desktop system...
Redundant disks
I set up a pair of disks in a RAID 1 configuration to be the “home” folder on my system. RAID arrays can be accomplished numerous ways. I do this in software under Linux; under Windows you are more likely to end up using a semi-hardware solution. However, disk redundancy only protects you from a single disk failure. If you nuke a file on your RAID pair, it's still gone in both places. That brings me to:
External drive with incremental backups
rsnapshot is “Time Machine for the rest of us”. Ive got it set up to push hourly incremental backups out to my external USB drive. On Windows, I had great success with Acronis True Image Home in differential mode, but Norton Ghost is an old standby. Next step:
Off site backups
Doing what I do protects me against most data-loss woes, but it won’t protect me against the meteorite that slams into my home office. For that, theres the concrete bunker Im working on in my spare time and off-site backups. While there are solutions that use cross-network syncing for the ultimate in worry-free backups (unless you worry about data security), I’d rather put my faith in “sneaker net” and a second external hard drive. Swapping external hard drives on a weekly basis and carrying the “off drive” to the office would mean never losing more than a weeks worth of important stuff…
What do you do to protect your important data?