The Importance Of Backing Up

I'm posting this in the general area as it will eventually save nearly everyone a headache of mass proportions.

Any regular reader of these forums has heard myself and many others talk about the importance of backing up your data on a regular schedule. I've described my method in a little detail, and others have also explained their methods. However, almost without fail, there will be a post in here at least once a week about someone's DB becoming corrupted, lost, deleted, or otherwise FUBARed.

It used to be a pain in the butt to remember to back things up, to track CDs, etc. Lately, however, it's becoming increasingly more affordable to simply buy an external hard drive and schedule it to back up once a day, once every other day, or whatever.

I personally bought a 320GB external drive for $99 at a local giant electronics store, and it backs up my entire 300GB drive once a week at 3:00am every Sunday. Mine takes about 90 minutes to complete, but your mileage may vary depending on the size of your drive, what you decide to backup, etc.

I'm just passing along the information that it has become amazingly cheap to backup everything for very cheap, and you don't even have to think about it. It's just there as a just in case when you need it. There's nothing more frustrating than realizing that everything you've worked on for the past month is suddenly gone, be it to DB corruption, hard drive failure, etc. However, that is completely beat out by the feeling that it's backed up securely.

I don't have any vested interest in this stuff. Rather, there isn't much else for $99 that affords that piece of mind. Keep it in mind the next time you're proud of all the work you've done. It would suck to lose it, wouldn't it? ;)