What would it mean to you if you lost all your files, music or photos because of a computer crash?

I don’t back up. I never thought about it. I would be pretty upset if i lost all my europe photos and university essays. Shoot now im going to have to look into it!

Like a maniac. I keep a external drive and do a back-up to that of what is on my computer. Every two weeks I do a back-up of my back-up and put that at a friends house a few blocks away. If my house burns down I still have a somewhat recent copy.

And a lot of the important stuff (mostly text files) are also pushed of to my hosting company on the other side of the country.

A huge external drive is 100 bucks.

I’ve been using Carbonite for the last few months—it’s completely automatic and transparent and backs up everything other than video files.
http://www.carbonite.com/

I still will do occasional backups to an external hard drive so if I need something I don’t have to wait for it all to download again, but I think between the two solutions, I have my bases covered for the most part.

Seriously.. One day you will wake up in the morning and your computer will not turn on. Everything will be gone. Hard drives fail. Back your stuff up.

I keep my pics on a CD disc. The rest…well, I guess I’d be in the soup. :-(

Being a computer nerd, i have probably 5 hard drives in one pc and 4 in the other, i run Windows Xp, Windows Vista and Windows 7, so yeah you bet your ass i back up my important files. I also make an image of the drive as a whole JUST in case.

I wouldn’t be devastated.
I would devastate what’s left of my computer instead.
With a baseball bat, probably.

There’s a current Fluther discussion of online backup for those interested in avoiding this scenario.
Is there a cloud storage website that has drag and drop?

@qashqai How could you blame it on the computer?

The only problem i have with online storage and backup is what if it get’s hacked or corrupt also? or maybe even a a virus? then what? The best way to do it is make an image of your drive and burn it.

The only thing I’d be devastated to lose would be all my pictures, which I keep on my external hard drive.

I always think about what would happen if the external hard drive busted. Luckily I keep most of them on CDs/DVDs.

I’m looking for a 1TB external drive just for that purpose, actually.

I would cry.

And that’s why I back everything up – Dropbox for small stuff, papers should be SOMEWHERE on my drives (and I have paper copies I believe), and the music folder gets backed up on two drives quite regularly.

@aprilsimnel , don’t get a false sense of security about an external HDD. They have a pretty high failure rate in their own right. I have multiple computers in my house, and I keep redundant copies of my digital photos and essential documents on them. My music files are all ripped from CDs, so I can recreate those if I have to.

That just happened to me a few weeks ago, that means that I don’t need all that stuff to remember who I am (or was) and believe me, it is not the first time it happened, the only bad thing is that I have to rip again all my albums back to the computer to keep my ipod alive (yes, I don’t buy digital music, I go to the record store and get the cd)

I have an external hard drive, which contains a duplicate of everything except my photos and videos. I also have a copy of most things on my personal drive on the server at work. I don’t back up the external drive as often as @johnpowell, more like every other month or so.

In a way, it’s more a peace of mind kind of thing, because I almost never go back and look at photos from the past. A few months ago, I did this collage of my kids, with a head shot of them from April of each year of their lives. It’s when the azaleas in the back are in bloom. But that’s the only use of past photos I have made in years.

I do have some past files that I looked at recently. But most of the past files of interest are my Quicken files and some stories I wrote back when. None of those stories is actually interesting to me except as a reminder of what I did.

My main concern is all the physical media I have—letters going back 30 years or more; slides going back nearly as long. Prints and negatives.

But I almost never look at them, either. So I think their presence in my life is a comfort thing. I know that if I need to, I can look back. If the house burned down, I would be quite upset about the loss, but I don’t think it would make a substantive difference.

This has actually happened to me more than once, in regards to my music files. The first time was an accident, the second time I thought I had them backed-up somewhere else and didn’t.

Both times, I realized that I didn’t need a lot of my music files anyway. Now I have everything backed up to an external hard drive.

All that porn, man…. It’s happened before, and I’d be upset. The music is really the worst, but when my external hdd died I also lost a lot of sentimentally valuable old pictures.

I still don’t back anything up, though.

i would restore them with one of the various data recovery programmes. Unless the files are overwritten, or the harddrive is physically damaged, they are not really lost.

All my music is on the actual cd, I don’t download unless someone sends me something. Then that gets thrown into a mix cd and is always backed up.
Most of my pictures are backed up [and on facebook] but I’m in the process of getting them all on cds.
My documents.. I don’t care that much about.
It’s mainly my 10k + pictures.

I back up all of my photos and videos on an external harddrive. I think I have my iTunes backed up. I need to check on that.

What would you recommend for Mac users to back up? Does it differ from PC?

I’ve got plenty of backups. In different locations.

Anybody have experience with Unison? In particular using Ubuntu? How effective is it? Any warnings? etc. I think it’s appropriate to ask on this thread but I can move it to it’s own question as well.