Backup Backup Backup

For the longest time, I was one of those guys who never backed up anything. 

I always said “If my hard drive crashes, I’ll just rebuild everything”.

And I did.  I’ve rebuilt my machines many times.  It’s always a pain, but I kinda enjoy doing it.  I guess I feel like it’s a chance to tinker all over again.

Every time I got a new hard drive, I looked at it as new raw storage space.  500g drive?  Yeah baby, I can collect 500g more stuff!  I figured everything I had, if I REALLY needed to, I could just download it all over again.  I never really considered what would happen if I lost a really BIG hard drive, and had to re-collect music and movies and stuff…

But lately, I’ve been collecting more and more stuff that I can’t replace.  I have digital photos of my kids.  I have videos of them roller skating.  I have photos of my son playing soccer, and my daughter in gymnastics.  I have the first chat logs from when my wife and I first met online…

And it’s starting to hit me that this stuff really is valuable to me, and if I were to loose it forever, I would be heartbroken.  I don’t want to loose the irreplaceable stuff.

I have a 2bay sata NAS that had 2 500g drives in it.  Not to long ago, I bought two new 1tb drives to replace the 500g drives.  It wasn’t until I had two 500g drives laying on my desk that I realized that I now had the opportunity to start doing backups of mine and my wife’s computers.  What the hell, I’ve got these big drives laying here doing nothing, so what the hell, I’ll tinker with some backups.

Thus started my campaign to backup all my stuff.

But what does it really MEAN to backup your stuff?  What do you need to backup?  Just photos and media?  Everything?  Do I really need to spend the space to backup a computer that’s only really used to browse the web?  There really are lots of things to consider when you start to think about building a backup strategy.

In the next few blog posts, I plan to explore some of the options and ideas behind backing stuff up in your home computers.

Next: What IS backup Anyway?