Given the last few posts here, backing up data and important files has obviously been on my mind. It’s coincidental more than anything, but I’ve continuously had problems with the primary removable Firewire drive I had bought to store my daily and weekly backups. So much so that it’s now in many pieces in the garbage with the disk platters more or less obliterated. It’s definitely unrecoverable and I feel much better given how much time was wasted repairing the drive and trying to get good successful backups.
What I’m really interested in here, and the main point of this post is this: How are you backing up your important files?
In particular, this is for the web developer folks. How are you backing up your design files (Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks) and your code files (HTML, PHP, Rails, MySQL). Perhaps the real first question is: Are you backing up? If so, how often? And to what form of media? If not, why not?
Once you’ve completed a project and it goes live, what then? Do you make a full backup of all the project files? Do you keep data available “online” (on disk) so that it’s easy to make changes down the road? Are you using a version control system such as CVS or Subversion? Do you develop using a local environment such as is available on Mac OS X? Do you clone your backups and keep a second copy offsite somewhere?
I’m pondering how I want to proceed with backups since my experiences with a certain brand of Firewire hard disks has left me with an extremely low opinion of their hardware and service technicians. The immediacy and economical value of using hard disks as opposed to tape has become more apparent in recent years as disks have grown larger and the cost per GB has decreased.
Tape is a good longer-term archival medium, but in my experience I often have to retrieve files for old projects quickly to make minor changes. Being able to mount a hard disk, grab the file and make the changes is just so much more efficient than finding the right tape, un-archiving the file off tape, making the change and then re-archiving the file.
Perhaps it makes sense to use both. Tapes for archival purposes. Once a week, perform a full backup to tape as well as archive completed work. And do daily backups to hard disk. I guess it ultimately depends on needs and practicality.
What do you think? What do you do?