Here's a New Years Resolution I started back in 2003, and I try to encourage all of my friends and co-workers to adopt it every year:
Check and setup backup plans on all work and home computers.
Even if it just means using Microsoft Backup to another local drive in the machine, something is better than nothing. Every hard drive will fail at some point, and it can be quite catastrophic to lose email, photos, source code, documents, Quicken or Money files, etc.
Many ISP's are offering their members space online to store data - my DSL provider offers 25GB free - a good amount to store critical data. (If you use something like this, you might consider encrypting/zipping/password protecting your files into one portable zip. Just remember on the other side of the ISP are people, and some people just can't help being curious!)
For my Windows XP boxes, I came across a
free tool last year called SyncToy:
SyncToy: a free powertoy download for file synchronization
It's meant to help photographers sync their photos from their cameras and computer, but it is
very useful for backup purposes. You can setup multiple plans in 5 different modes - so you have plenty of options for external drives and devices, network drives, and local drives. And, it can be scheduled to run your jobs through Scheduled Tasks - very nice!
For my Linux and Solaris machines, I simply use tar/gzip in a cron job to backup data to a network share.
No matter what OS you use, there are tons of free backup utilities available - get that data backed up and save yourself some pain!
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