Making Backups

My first rule about starting any project is that whatever is created is worth backing up.

For things where you'll frequently find errors or other needs for a constant stream of changes and enhancements, backups will quickly become stale and even dangerous should you accidentally restore from an outdated backup.

In developing these forums, the main site, and many other complicated projects, I've found that the backup process quickly becomes arduous when keeping as many backups as I do. It's mostly out of an obsessive-compulsive desire to protect my hard work from all contingencies, such as fire, tornadoes, me clobbering my own changes with outdated or corrupted files, hard drive failures, and -- perhaps the one thing that makes me the most paranoid -- hackers.

These forums, for instance, have no less than 7 backups. Two of them are offsite on remote servers, two on external hard drives, one on the live server (in addition to the site itself), one on a USB thumb drive that's actually shaped like a human thumb, and one more on a second internal hard drive on my main workstation. You could say I over-do backups quite a bit.

Disasters strike and hackers, who hate this site just because it's a "w***" site, are always on my mind and the backups are the one thing that provides peace of mind.

Here's the thing, though: You don't have to be this nutty to benefit from backups. If you have stuff you want to keep, you may think your luck may never run out. Do it ANYWAY.

It sounds like you need to come up with a solution to automate your backups. You consider Carbonite?

Making 7 backups IS obsessive. Doesn't that get tiring?

I'd do dropbox or like Wolfwood said, Carbonite or Mozy. Problem solved.

Backups are very, very, important, especially doing them regularly. I talk from (painful) expirience there due to material that I lost in the past.

Hey, welcome back, Doitsujin!

Regarding backups, it's funny how sometimes I purge old data, thinking I'll never need it again, only to feel really bad about it a few months later. That's why there's an XML feed here: user link on forums.nitrocosm.com to grab a full copy of all forums content.

The basic rule of backups, as Patrick Norton of TekThing (user link on www.tekthing.com) says: Make three backups, two on different kinds of media and one off site.

I've started making weekly backups of the database and uploading them to Google Drive, in addition to everything else.