Do you do back-ups ?

[Santa's little helper]

If yes which method do you use ?

My plan is to make monthly or so back-ups of the account I use and possibly a few other files on CD-R.

But I'm thinking that if I'm working on something important like a programme or document I should do daily back-ups as well. I don't have a floppy so CD-RW seems the best solution. This leads to 2 questions:

1) How many times can one rewrite a CD-RW before it becomes unreliable ? Wikipedia says around 1000 but does anyone here have different experiences ? I assume it varies depending on manufacturer but what is the worse one might get ?

2) If a hard disk is going to fail is there generally warning or can it fail completely unexpectedly ? If there is warning there is less need for daily back-ups.

[MasonM]

USB external harddrives are pretty cheap these days. I back up all my personal/important stuff to that on a regular basis.

[oz]

I always make images of my complete system, but also use flash drives for certain files. It only takes a few minutes to restore one of the images if I screw up the entire system.

[Santa's little helper]

I always make images of my complete system...

Which medium do you use ? Ideally I would want to do that too.

[Santa's little helper]

USB external harddrives are pretty cheap these days. I back up all my personal/important stuff to that on a regular basis.

I don't know anything about hardware ; my concern with that is getting something which works with Linux.

[oz]

Which medium do you use ? Ideally I would want to do that too.

I generally put a copy of the image on a separate partition for fast access, but also burn a copy to a blank CD.

[Santa's little helper]

I generally put a copy of the image on a separate partition for fast access, but also burn a copy to a blank CD.

How do you fit your whole system on a CD ? I've never seen a CD which accepts more than 700 MB and my new system already has 2-3 GB. After I install everything I need it will have quite a bit more.

As for storing stuff on a separate partition it won't do you much good if your harddrive kicks the bucket , will it ?

[oz]

How do you fit your whole system on a CD ? I've never seen a CD which accepts more than 700 MB and my new system already has 2-3 GB. After I install everything I need it will have quite a bit more.

As for storing stuff on a separate partition it won't do you much good if your harddrive kicks the bucket , will it ?

You can limit the size of the image you create so that it fits on one or more CDs, or a DVD.

Right, if the hard drive goes, you probably lose your images, too. I frequently try different distributions, so having the images handy on a separate partition makes it quick to restore whatever image I want back on my computer.

[celticgeek]

I do monthly backups, but only of my data files, not of my whole system. I generally copy these files to a directory named "Backup" with the date, and burn it to CD. This is usually only about 400 MB or so at most. I do not back up the music I have ripped or things of that nature. If I need to backup lots of data, I tend to copy it to a DVD disk, but that is pretty rare.

I also use an online file storage system, where I back up important data files (for my consulting business, for example) as often as weekly, depending on how much is happening with the files.

If I need to carry files around with me, I tend to put them on a USB external hard drive for easy portability.

[MikeTbob]

I usually don't do backups. I do however keep copies of my critical system files, fstab, grub, email addresses, bookmarks and so forth. If I trash my system, it just get re-installed from the CD's. Thank god I am not a Novice anymore and I haven't trashed a system in years now.

But yes If your HD is failing it *usually* will start giving you errors if you use SMART to keep an eye on it. I actually recieve emails to the root account when SMART detects disk analomies. But I have seen HD jst fail out of the blue.