Nagging appreciated.

I don't trust our back up drive. I have a 4 gig USB that I try and put our documents and photos on and refresh every couple months.

Also, after Katrina, NYTImes ran a great article on what to grab in a moment's notice. After that I bought several USBs that password protected, scanned in insurance info, photos of the house, bank info, credit card info (so you know your CC limits), mortgage specifics, birth and marriage certificates, etc. I put one in the safety deposit box, sent one to a relative for safe-keeping, gave another to my DH.

johnliu,
You suggested sotware for automatic backing up. I have windows XP & media center for my computers. Which backing up software would you recommend?

viyaram, I'm not sure about what's best for windows. My PCs are work machines, so I don't do the backing up myself. You could check cnet, pcworld, etc for "best backup" articles and find free or cheap software. There's lots of choices, Microsoft has built backup into recent Windows versions too, I don't know which is the best.

Barring that, I'd buy Norton Ghost ($70) and use that, it is a proven tool. Ghost and similar software will make an exact image of your hard drive so that, if the drive fails, you replace it, boot from the Norton DVD, use Ghost to restore that image to the replacement drive, and then your system will be exactly as it was before, with all the same applications, preferences, settings, data, etc.

That's different from merely backing up your data files. In that case, if your drive fails, you have to replace it, then reload Windows, reinstall all your applications, put your settings back the way they were, and finally copy your data back. That's more tedious, although you do end up with a clean install of Windows.

For Macs, I use Time Machine and will now supplement with CarbonCopyClone.

I use Retrospect Express (for my Mac) which come with many external hard drives. You have the option of making an exact copy of your drive which you can use to boot from if needed and doing incremental backups. I always make sure that the bootable version is a working version as that is what saved my bacon when my drive died. The other is the one that I use on a regular basis and I can pick earlier versions if something gets corrupted, however, I cannot boot from it.

To add, and don't keep those backups plugged into anything...perform your backup & unplug it from the computer AND from any power source, etc. If you get a power surge that fries your computer, it will also fry anything else plugged in. Yes, even if you have a UPS or surge protector....better safe than sorry!

Forget hardware failure. Virus/malwares are probly in 95% of all ur machines. U just don't know it's there until disaster then it's too late.

Oh yeah, important stuffs, I have at least one copy.

Mozy and other services will back everything up remotely without you needing to worry about it after install and payment. For me (after a particularly heartbreaking loss of photos I had no where else) it's so worth the $5 a month. My brother picked Mozy for me (he's a technogeek) but there are other services.

For Macs, SuperDuper is what I use and feel comfortable recommending to friends. Besides being very reliable, it tells exactly what is going on, meaning you are copying from where and to where--this assumes a backup involving an external hard drive. It also can make a bootable clone, meaning that you can start up and run your computer from the external hard drive when the internal drive is hosed. (You wouldn't want to run this way without making another copy for safety.) CarbonCopyCloner will make a bootable clone but had a cryptic interface, meaning it was difficult for non-technical users to be sure about what direction the copy would take. The CCC interface may have changed, but I've moved on with SuperDuper.

The problem I have with Retrospect is that it copies files in a format that is not the same as your internal hard drive, so you cannot pull an individual file from it & you must restore using a computer that has another copy of Retrospect. This makes it difficult to determine that you are actually getting a good backup copy.

SuperDuper can be run for free to try it out; when you pay the small license fee, you can run a Smart Backup, which copies what has changed to your backup for a fraction of the time required to do a full copy.

A Restore operation should be just as simple and straightforward to do as the backup copy--only the direction is reversed. Not all backup software provides this. SuperDuper does.

Apple's Time Machine is convenient in that it runs without operator direction, but Time Machine is too time consuming & complicated to use for a full restore. I use Time Machine only for having protection for my most recent files.

The best strategy involves more than one backup copy, with at least one of them offsite, either an external hard drive or remote storage service. If you rely on external hard drives, you should backup daily & rotate them weekly.