
Backup strategies
The two main reasons for backing up your data are to prevent loss due to hard drive failure, accidental deletion, or other causes. Hard drives only last on average 4 - 5 years and can develop bad sectors or fail completely at any time. So it is 100% necessary to make backup copies of your work. The second reason would be to retrieve an older version of a file you have changed
My "simplest scenario" backup suggestion for everyone:
- Make a daily backup of you Home-Folder and any other personal files to an external drive. This can be a regular update backup or a series of incremental backups. Incremental backups work like Time Machine and preserve a "snapshot" of your files at the time of the backup. Each incremental backup is a complete picture of those files so you can go back and retrieve them. More on incremental backups....
- Make a full clone of your whole system to a dedicated hard drive or partition and update it once a week (or make a new one by choosing to erase the clone destination.) This gives you a full working System to restore from instantly if there is a disaster.
- And Better yet: make another clone or Home-Folder backup to another drive and save one of these external drives off-site if possible. I have heard of lightning or fire taking out some ones computer along with all the external hard drives connected to it! Off site backups are a good idea!