I use both disk & file based. When I setup a box I use DD to make a disk image of the barebones system. Then after a week or so of using it, customizing it, and installing apps I need, I clean it up & make another DD image. Then I use file based backup from there on out. So far every disaster has been quickly solved with - get a new hard drive (if necessary), restore the gzipped disk image, run a reverse version of my rsync script. Before I had this process down, once the customized disk image was bad, so I had to reinstall from scratch. Never again, hence two dd files of each system.

all my preferences & settings are backed-up in my head –> best external drive ever!

Really? I find that my computer is way better at remembering things than my head. In fact, anything that doesn’t get classified as “interesting” seems to be confined to a temporary cache which gets flushed quite often. If I don’t write it down, it’s gone.

I backup all my emails by having every one of my email accounts pointing at my teamcoltra(.at.)gmail.com account. When i reply they seem to come from geeksparadox.com.

Then all those emails get downloaded via pop onto my other email address that is hosted on a “secret” domain which is set on the google apps engine which then captures all the emails and archives them. This way if I ever have to delete all my emails or some punk gets on and deletes my emails -> I don’t lose everything important.

I USED to have a very VERY complex backup system which would backup files based on date then month then year. However, when my harddrive crashed I decided not to do it again… out of how hard it was to maintain.

…partly kidding! But hey, ain’t that the way to go, after all?

At work we use Veritas on the Win2k3 servers and backup to tape on a nightly basis. It is actually quite reliable. Tapes are relatively cheap (drives are super expensive though) and the process is actually pretty fast. But that solution is naturally impractical unless you are ok with shelling out $2k for a tape drive

On the windows side, I use Acronis True Image.

This was what I was going to say. Acronis True Image > Ghost in every facet! It’s faster, less problems and I have never had a corrupted image before. I have a 1 TB drive for backups and I do nightly incremental backups and weekly full system backup. I keep them seperate. So technically I have two full images of my system, and worst case scenario, one is a week old. If I just want to back up files I use SyncBackSE. I use it to backup just my files to my server in my office via FTP. It’s fast and works well. It scans the destination and the source and then only uploads what has changed…all automatically. Again, I do this every night. This is typically what I recommend for my customers as well…one of these things, or both. But Acronis is so great, I usually just do full system backups. It can backup 50GB entire drive, while in Windows in about 15-20 minutes easy.