I admit it .. I'm a 'backup fanatic' - In my pursuit of never loosing data, I use both RAID1 (mirroring), USB harddrives and NAS devices, plus "out-of-office" backup - and I seldom delete anything (leading to the ever-growing storage problem).
How do I do it then!! - Well first of all I'm using a very nice (and free) backup utility called Cobian Backup
Cobian Backup is simply put a "scheduled backup agent". It runs as a service being able to do scheduled backups to local, network and FTP locations. It does both full and incremental (based on archieve bit) backups and can compress the complete backupset info a single file using standard ZIP format.
My backup "process" looks something like this:
- Daily (differential) scheduled backups of very important files, e.g. "inetpub" folder, Word/OneNote documents etc. to a RAID1 NAS device.
- Every 14th day a complete HD backup is done to a RAID1 NAS drive, which is located in a 'hard to find place' (to avoid theft).
- Every month a complete (approx. 500GB) "all-data-backup" is done and stored in a safe.
- Every third month a complete (approx. 500GB) "all-data-backup" is done (rotation occurs!) and stored in a safe on a external location.
Needless to say - I've never lost a file! - Remember "Only dumb people or people whose data is worth nothing is careless about backup!!" - so hurry up, start taking those backups :-)