How important do you think making backups is?

Question

What things do you think should be regularly backed up? Give reasons to support your answer.

Answer 1

It's totally unimportant UNTIL something happens to your drive and you don't have any backups.

Backup anything you can't already load or install from another disk if you need to: word processing documents, spreadsheets, photos and scanned documents, email

Also back up any configuration files you can find, especially for browsers (bookmarks, options), MS Word document templates, Normal.dot in particular, With these, even an old backup can be more useful than no backup at all.

Answer 2

How much do you value your data? Can you live without your data if your hard drive were to die, or you were to get a virus that wiped your drive, or if your computer would not boot into the operating system and the only way to repair it was a format and reinstall? Again, how important is your data to you, that will determine if you should back it up and how often. I backup to an external hard drive, but because the drive could fail, I also make an image of my computer and burn it to DVD (it takes three DVD's to back up my data) as well. Redundancy is always good.

Answer 3

financials, photos, documents you've created and anything that you don't want lost if your hard drive goes or gets stolen/burned/whatever.

We had backups of our financials and it was a good thing becase when we upgraded our MSNMoney it corrupted our file. Who wants to go back 8 years and re-create everything again.

We keep 2 backups. One on a server and the other on a disk stored in a fireproof box. Call us paranoid, but we're covered.

Answer 4

It depends. Just think of the stuff you have on your computer and if they were all gone the next day. How hard will it be to recreate it from scratch?

Answer 5

Anything and everything that you don't want to lose. Reason? Because if something goes wrong, you'll lose it all. It's just common sense.