System backup strategy

[lucamar]

Hardware or OS-related problems are rare today.

You must be really lucky 

I'm home user, guys. Corporate system is another story 

Even home users (and more so "hobbyist" programmers) should have a good backup strategy. It's all too easy to lose months (or years!) of work from lots of causes: a program fails and trashes your main disk, the disk(s) wear out (or fail) and start banging their heads all over the plates, you wake up one day with "butter fingers" and the laptop falls down a staircase, etc. And it almost always happens at just the worse moment.

Nowadays people have a single "big" (1, 2 or more TiB) disk and keep everything in it so as to have it inmediately accesible, not realizing that if it fails they'll lose everything, whereas with a simple dual odd-even days backup strategy they would lose at most one day of easily recoverable work. The motto still is: never keep your all eggs in one basket

[af0815]

The main advantage of backups is that they reduce the effects of our own mistakes. Hardware or OS-related problems are rare today.

I cannot say Hardware or OS-related problems are rare, a aktivation of the linux subsystem of windows can make a mess on your PC. Bootin into repair and .... a good backup is gold. And harddisks easily die .. also tested ... a good back.....

[jwdietrich]

The main advantage of backups is that they reduce the effects of our own mistakes. Hardware or OS-related problems are rare today.

I cannot say Hardware or OS-related problems are rare, a aktivation of the linux subsystem of windows can make a mess on your PC. Bootin into repair and .... a good backup is gold. And harddisks easily die .. also tested ... a good back.....

Well, I am mainly a Mac user. The situation may be different on alternative operating systems.

BTW, as mentioned above, SVN is a good unconventional backup option, too. However, it works, of course, for project folders only.