I got home from visiting the in-laws to find my computer dead.  The C drive is basically toast.  (I'm now moving my stuff over to DH's old desktop, which I'd been planning to do for a while since my old desktop was OLD, but hadn't gotten around to yet because change is hard, y'all.  So hopefully no new posts about buying a computer.)

But that was only about a day's worth of hassle because ever since I lost some pilot data as a graduate student, I have been compulsive about backing up my computer.

Now, I do not have the kind of (human) memory to remember to manually back things up once a week or whatever.  So ever since there have been automated solutions, I have used them.  Early on that meant I had my hard drives set up in a RAID array, meaning that instead of having one hard drive in my computer, I had two that were essentially copies of each other, the idea being that there would probably be some time in between one dying and the other dying.

These days I use the cloud as backup for my harddrives (I also use dropbox and drive etc, but that's all for work stuff).  My backup program of choice (completely not sponsored) is called Backblaze.  It is comparatively inexpensive at $7/month and it is pretty comprehensive.  And it just works.

Now, there are two potential problems:  1.  if you don't have unlimited data in your internet plan, it will eat a lot of your monthly limit as it uploads things, at least at first, and 2. it is SLOW.  But for something that you only need for hopefully rare emergencies, slow isn't so bad.

I also use puresync to copy my external hardrive to an internal one every time I plug it into my desktop.  External hd are more prone to toasting than are internal in my experience (possibly because I am not as careful with my external hd as I ought to be, often throwing them into a bag and occasionally dropping them), so it's nice having that additional layer of backup.

How do you backup your computer stuff?

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