How often do you back up your data?

[aysiu]

Just curious. I do a back up about every week.

[matthew]

I voted "every time I make a change" which is true for individual and important data files and may be several times in one day for certain files.

I do a major system backup including settings and so on about once every three weeks.

[GeneralZod]

I have very, very little data that could be termed "irreplaceable", so I tend to just back this up every 6 months when I upgrade to the next version of Kubuntu :)

[majikstreet]

Every 0 hours. I don't back up.

[ow50]

I have a script to back-up important school work, code and config files in /etc and $HOME. The script also lists files in selected directories and all installed packages. A cron job runs that every day at 7.00 copying the backups to my other hard drive and the file lists to both hard drives.

Sometimes if I have worked on some code for a long time without uploading to a foreign subversion server, I'll get paranoid and back it up on my USB stick as well in case my both hard drives would fail.

When doing something major like partitioning or installing an operating system, I'll back-up /etc, $HOME and all personal documents to a CD.

[Kvark]

I backup all the less important files every time I reinstall, which is every 6th month. Between that all the important files get backed up by that I copy paste a dir or choose "save as" for a document every time I feel that an important milestone has been reached for that document.

It would be better to let a backup program do it every morning but I've heard too many stories about strange backup archive files that the backup program can't restore any data from and no other program can open.

[public_void]

I backup my Windows side, with a .bat script and burn to CD using saved burning settings. But thats because my important works on the Windows side. (Is it really safe with Windows???). I don't have any important stuff on my Ubuntu partition, so I don't bother. If I did it would be the same sort of thing.

[xequence]

I have every program I install and use on a seperate partition (Paint Shop Pro, Firefox, Azureus, Java, Frostwire, and a whole plethora of other things), and every piece of data I use on a seperate partition. For whenever I reinstall windows.

And that means quite a bit of things... I find myself doing a clean install often.

[Xian]

I use rsync for weekly backups to separate partitions, which allows me to only be required to backup the actual changes which have been made instead of the entire directory, and so it takes very little time after the initial sync. Then once a month I do a backup to either a disk(s) or another HD.

[poptones]

I have all my userland stuff under /usr (/usr/var, /usr/home, /usr/tmp, /usr/srv etc) which is stored on a 6gb raid5. The "root" is stored on a 1.8gb partition and I just dd it over every day to a duplicate partition on another drive - takes less than a minute.

I also backup /var/cache/apt to another partition as I am on dialup.

I have about ten old userland backups on my main 350gb (raid5) drive. I'm working on a hashed filesystem because I'm sick of wasting all that space storing duplicate files.

[Malphas]

I store my important data (CV, university assignments, scans of certificates and documents) on a GMail account. I don't backup the rest as it's just too much to bother with (over half a terabyte).

[stimpack]

Once a week. Used to be never, once in a blue moon then monthly. Time between backups gets less every time I lose somthing :rolleyes:

[matthew]

Once a week. Used to be never, once in a blue moon then monthly. Time between backups gets less every time I lose somthing :rolleyes:I think that's how we all develop our backup schedule. :)

[Crazy Man]

I usually just back up my media (music, videos etc) and projects ( and anything considered vital) when I feel the need to (on to my server).

[tageiru]

I use rsync over ssh to backup my home directory to my server every week. I have had my fair share of disasters so I don't take any chances.

[mattheweast]

Backing up is for the weak! Real men don't backup.

Yeah, I backup about twice a week, more if I remember to.

[aysiu]

Based on the poll results so far, it looks like a close race between not backing up at all and backing up every week... odd.

[Clazzy]

I used to back up constantly, but that was when I used Windows ME, which, every 5-6 months, would (without fail) manage to corrupt the hard drive, give a BSOD on startup, or just refuse to even start Windows. Of course, this is coming from the OS that crashed on startup 40% of the time, did not have a working scandisk and had problems adding up folder filesizes. Anyway, I have yet to back up my data other than for my biyearly Windows wipe or for when I bravely upgraded to Dapper. I believe that's twice in the past 11 months, then.

[YourSurrogateGod]

Depends. There are those days that I forget to do it and after doing something big and important, I feel the need to back up what I've been doing (after losing data once, I'm scared of losing more of it.)