Backups have saved my ass a bunch of times in the past several years.

The basic thing most people need to learn is to never keep important files on the same drive as your OS install.

I've never backed up an entire system or drive. I backup my e-mail, documents, and my production folder about once per week to an external drive. And then periodically I drop a copy of the latest backup onto a secondary system, so that there is a backup of the backup. I've been meaning for a while to get another external drive for the backup-backup, and keep it at another location.

The thing with backups, Im always concerned about the backup failing, getting corrupted, or otherwise not being able to restore from it because something happened at some point in time and ruined your ability to do so.

IE, you might be backing up, see the files verified and stored but something is wrong with the ability to restore form them. It mainly is a concern for the tape storage format, but could affect a hard drive by misconfiguration, virus, or some other unknown variable.

And the only way to really verify that everything is still working as expected is to restore from backup once or twice a year to confirm your solution is still viable.

Plus, he talks about it takes 2.5 days to do a full back up.....how long does it take to do a restore if that's your backup time? If it took 2.5 days+some period of time per differential then incrementals adding up to 3 days or so...and then to redo what wasn't backed up. That's getting into 4-5 days worth of restoring at least 3 before you know it's working or not. Granted it saves you months if not more of work doing it that way, but it also puts a lot of eggs in one basket so to speak.

I don't bother backing up OS or program installs, because that's usually where the viruses and malware hide out. Of course I'm just one guy and not an actual I.T. person having to consider doing everything 200 times.

My PC runs on two HDD, one for Windows and over crucial shit, and then a much larger drive for the peripheral programs, games, music, video etc etc. Anyway, so I recently overwrote the entirety of my 2nd HDD Program Files folder, and man did I wish I had a backup. Fortunately most programs are easy to redownload and I managed to recover most of the data thats not so easy to replace.

I think for me the stuff I can't afford to lose is relatively small in size and isn't modified much, so I just save it all in loads of different places, on USB sticks, on a different HDD etc. Losing anything else is really just an inconvenience.

I just manually back up my data weekly. Once in a while, I back up my whole HDD with Norton Ghost (not in Windows). I use multiple sources too including offline. If L.A. gets blown up, oh well.

I wonder what VS does with its backups.