I have look after computer systems much longer than I care to remember and from this I have found that most people will only backup after they have lost every thing and have come crying to the sys admin after the fact. As Sarfan says it can happen to you.

I have three separate systems each has 2 data drives, the data drives are backup up to the identical drive on the other two systems. ie there are two backups as well these two drives are backup up to a third portable drive which is kept offsite.

Note: I have twice been in a situation where I have destroyed a backup during a restore. This is why 3 backups are kept. one point worth STRESSING is make sure you CAN restore without doing damage. This is a point many people have over looked.

The best thing of me when I backup my system is to use a backup hard drive known as a slave drive and also burn the files on a blank disc, CDR,CDRW,DVDR,DVDDL or DVDRW. But burn the files at slow speed not high speed, That can cause disc errors. The faster you burn the it can miss files, fast speed burn is a light write on the disc. The slow burn on the disc is a deep burn, it burns it properly it. I have try fast burn..no good I hate to say and the disc will make it,s way to the bin. The best burn is slow. You can setup you CDRW,DVDR or DVDDLRW Burner from high to slow speed.
Another thing is try not to use storage usb sticks, they can sometimes make the errors on files awell.

Hi Ray,
As I said in the backup blurb in this forum, CD's etc are not considered safe media for crucial data files - music yes, but not data. Even a slow burn will still have CRC errors and it only needs a bad CRC error to render the file useless/corrupt/unreadable etc. They are fine for music because a music file can survive CRC errors, but a data file cannot. If you must use CD's etc, always (ALWAYS) copy all the contents of a new CD back to the computer so that you make absolutely sure it has no problems. Another good idea is the click on the "Verify burn" box. The burning software will check the CD against the original data. This is NOT foolproof and can still contain CRC errors, but it is a step in the right direction. The physical copy of the new CD back to the computer ensures that each and every file can be read.

I have found USB sticks to be totally reliable. The only problem with the current rash of USB sticks is that they only write over the same area repeatedly, and they have a finite number of writes before failure. The later (read more expensive) USB sticks have software that spreads the data over the whole stick so that the whole stick gets used uniformly, and this dramatically extends the life of the stick. Having said that, my first stick - 128mb purchased in 1997 - is still in use today. If you can write to it, you can read from it. The technology in USB sticks is used in still/movie camera memory cards, phone cards etc, etc, and they are totally reliable within their nominated finite number of "reads and writes" which are in the millions.
I have used USB sticks for short term backups for over 12 years and usually carry the the critical ones with me in my medical kit as an "offsite backup".

I guess I need to add memory cards and USB sticks to the "backup Blurb" in this forum, because they are valid forms of media.

Hope this all helps - backups are absolutely vital.
Cheers
Allan

I will reinforce what sarfan39 has said that CD's are NOT a safe medium for backup. I have done very extensive testing (around about 80 CD's) of this media and have found that although the failure rate is not high it still exists. I found the failure rate was around 1 in 7 to 10 CD's burned not matter how much care was taken. Much testing showed the corruption always occured in a single stretch on the disk (ie consective sectors) and ranged from anywhere between a coupe of megabytes to around 10 megabytes. Another point I will mention is that the life of these is also limited and over time will slowly fail. Roughly speaking around 20 percent of disks older than around 6 to 7 years have serious errors.
I now have a fourth backup this being a portable 250gig USB harddrive.

Looking after hard earned data is NOT being paranoid.......