What’s your backup procedure? I find it surprising how many people never backup or when they do backup, it’s only once a year. Even when they KNOW they should and know the risk. Developing a regular pattern for backup is very important.

My own backup procedure has changed over the years. In the old days (5 years ago) I would simply back up to CDs and be done with it. Then I moved to backing up to another hard drive or onto another computer by network cable. Now with the profileration of low-cost hard drives its easier than ever – and external hard drives make this even better.

I have three external hard drives and one of them is what I store everything on. The other two are for rotating my backups or for temporary storage. I can share them across all of the computers in the network. I just recently got a new LaCie 250 Gig drive and it’s really sweet. They’re only $188 and work great.

I try to back up my files weekly and always take my backup home. That way no matter what happens I will most likely have the files I need to keep going if anything serious were to happen to my computers.

Some software that is handy for backing up a lot of data: Karens Replicator (it’s for PC and is free) and (new to me and also free) is SilverKeeper (for the Mac). These types of programs are great because they’ll check for updated files and only copy changes. They also will ignore errors and keep transfering (most of the time). Errors such as filenames being too long, or whatever error you might, you might have :-). When you come home and you’re wondering what kind of errors you have, you can look in the error log and there they are. Ok, that’s all from me folks.