Rotating backups

Once you have worked out a way to back up all your data, there is one more consideration.

just backing it up isn't enough. if something goes wrong somewhere you might be backing up bad data. maybe you save a word document over another one. You don't find the problem until after your backup, so now the bad data is in your backup and you have no way of going back to the good file.

So rotate your backups. that is, instead of overwriting the backup with the new one, keep a 'trail' of backups going back in time. if you are backing up a few gigabytes of data at a time you don't want to have too many versions, but maybe more than one.

One strategy is to have "yesterday", "last week" and "last month".

if you are technical the internet is full of ways to write your own backup system, but even the most geeky of us make mistakes, and (as we said elsewhere) backups is not the place to be making mistakes.

So buy backup software, and make sure your backup software will automate a rotating backup cycle for you. (it is called "rotating" because sometimes the disks or tapes or whatever the oldest backup is on is reused for the newest backup)

One more thought: keep that oldest backup offsite (or even ALL your backups).