Backup your data today…

So I have good news for you. If you are reading this post I doubt that your hard drive just crashed and you lost a bunch of data. So with this good news I will give you some advice. Go out today and buy a USB drive and backup your data that you would hate to loose and keep doing it at least once a week. More often is better.

So why am I posting about this? A few weeks ago (5 days before a big launch) I had a HD crash. It was the worst time that it could happen as I needed the machine for development. I will post about that later. Long story short, lost about 1 day of data and bunch of time rebuilding a new development machine (new mac book pro).

Here is the good news for me. I was at Basecamp yesterday and brought back my USB laptop drive enclosure and tried booting/reading the HD that crashed. I was very very lucky and was able to get my data off the drive. The important stuff I had backups of on remote servers etc but some of my personal stuff I did not. I normally do try and rebuild my machines regularly and perform backups then but did not have a strict backup policy.

This is all changing this week and I will be going to a daily-ish backup routine. Most of my stuff that is important (code) is backed up and versioned in SVN as I develop the code. The other stuff that is important is email but is not crucial to have daily versions of.

The cool thing about using VMWare Fusion for my dev enviro is that I have a snapshot of a clean development environment that I can restore to. This means that should something happen to my machine I just install OSX, Fusion and restore. I can then copy over my data and I will be all set to get going.

On the Mac side I will be trying out the time machine functionality that will backup data as I use the machine. I think that this is a little much so will do it twice a week and I think that will be plenty.

Later I will make a follow up post of my setup and other options.

Tagged as: backup, data