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How often should you backup? This is not a simple question. It depends a great deal on how much your system gets used, what kind of data is to be backed up, and how often you change the data you want to protect. For the casual computer user who keeps little information of any importance on their computer, the answer might be "once a month". For people like myself, the answer is likely to be "daily" and maybe even "hourly" for certain critical, often changed files. I mentioned above, how I backup. Here's the answer I got when I asked my co-reviewer Jeff Partridge: "I have two scheduled backup jobs in the pipe at all times. They both run late at night when no-one is using the system. The first one does Incremental backups and runs every night. That gives my data protection, but also protects against losing older data that might have been erased unintentionally. The other job does a full backup, once a week, to an entirely different drive and folder. That helps protect me against a drive failure as well as the usual 'oops!' errors. Neither is as secure as a backup to CD-R, but I really don't like sitting there feeding it CDs any more than anyone else I know." |