Read 'Til You Drop

I use an external hard drive, but only for my documents and pictures, so I don't need any software. However, www.spacejock.com has a program called ySync, for free, that is supposed to be really good. He also has a lot of free software designed for writers. Also, Kim Komando's site, www.komando.com, has hundreds of links to free programs she recommends.

If you are looking for an off site backup, I use www.mozy.com to backup my writing and scans of important documents. The first 2G are free, and you can have it automatically back up every day if you wish.

I recommend Bounceback for backing up your entire drive to an external hard drive; if you're looking for online storage then I'd suggest ElephantDrive (which never forgets!).

Eh. I have an external drive - but I have one partition on my harddrive that all my data is on, so I just copy that to my external probably once a month or so. *shrugs*

I do a regular backup of my photos and information (work, novels, notes, and such) onto cds which I then keep outside of the house. Information goes onto a thumb drive more regularly. In fact, I'm moving toward having the default location of my novels being on the thumb drive with my desktop and notebook computers each holding a backup that's up-to-date according to last use.

Once or twice a year I backup important emails and my bookmarks. Oh, and anything I downloaded from iTunes.

That's all I do. I see no reason to backup my entire system. It's all recoverable given a few hours of effort and installation.

Oh, and I only use Macs but I don't use any of the special stuff they offer for backing up. Just doesn't suit my needs for what I have. Maybe if I worked with thousands of pics and many more information files...

Although this won't back up your entire system, you can burn a CD or DVD with copies of sets of files.

I burn CDs regularly and send them out of state to either my mom or my sister (depending on content)

This way if there is a loss of computer or fire then I have most of my current work and all of my old work

I highly recommend Windows Home Server. I use it to keep all our laptops backed up and our data safer. It will automatically back up your computer every night, and if you have more than one drive in the server it can keep a copy of your work on separate physical drives. I like the automatic feature; I don't have to think about it, remind myself to do it, or schedule a task on my PC. It just works.

It just came out, and a number of vendors are selling systems all ready to go. Check out HP for a really nice little box that you can tuck away somewhere and let it do its thing. The box is supposed to be available by Thanksgiving, so it would make a nice "house gift" for Christmas.

I only tend to back up My Documents, since I have an alternate path on my computer with a nice system restore point early in my computer's life. For the My Documents folder, I do two things - store them online and on CDs. I generally keep two online backups in programs like Yahoo Briefcase and another generic program.

I send copies of my books to my gmail account. Quick and dirty, just in case.

Many pics I also store on my photobucket account. I also put many things on thumb drives and CD's.

But if something happens to the house, at least I have web-based backups somewhere.

I have two internal hard drives and use the second one to store copies of files and program set up files that I'd rather not lose. It's not as comprehensive as a total system snapshot but it's worked for me through a couple of main hard drive failures.

I don't back up enough. I use thumb drives mostly, but another thing I like to do is to send files to myself as e-mail attachments. GMail gives you 2 gigs and my clunky old ASCII word processor creates small test files.

Admittedly, I only back up my entire set of documents when I move computers. But when I do, I filedump everything onto CD.

I also use a datastick for the most important files. Those things are great.

I've had bad experience with backup software, so what I do is simply have an external hard drive, and manually copy new files every week. Important stuff like photographs gets copied to two different hard drive and burnt on DVD.

I have a second external hard drive that every once in a while (3-4 months) gets a filedump of my complete hard drive. Once it's full, I'll probably delete the first set, but that'll be some time.

We have a network attached storage (NAS) disk attached to our router. I believe it's a Maxtor, but I can't remember at this point -- there are a lot of models out there nowadays. I just set up a new directory called something like "My Docs 11-06-07" and copy everything more recent than last time. Every now and then I copy everything in My Documents to the NAS disk.

I back up every day or two days when I'm writing or revising heavily. I use a zip (ducking so the wet fish don't hit me in the face).

I =should= do a whole system backup, copying the entire freakin' hard drive, but I don't. For that I would use an external hard drive, if I had one.

I back up email content once a month, which is way not often enough.