What do you use to do your backups? Right now I'm saving my important files to CD-RW, but manually replacing changed files is a little more hassle than I'd like. Worse yet, I currently have no way of verifying the integrity of the backups, which is a bit of a problem since CD media might not be as reliable as people think (see recent Slashdot story (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/24/1253248&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137&tid=198)).

I am now looking for a good backup solution. As usual, I am thinking of rolling my own, but also as usual I know I'm likely to give up in the middle of the project. In the interest of considering all my options I'd like to hear about your experiences with backup software for Windows. I'd also like to hear about the kinds of media you use for your backups.

I use the backup software that comes with win2k and XP, and I backup to a file on an external USB hard drive. I can store tons of backups. It is, unfortunately, susceptable to the typical hard drive problems, but it's better than nothing, and doesn't have the problems with CD's (like needing more than one - my backups are on gigabytes in size).

I use the scheduler to back up every day, then once a week, I archive them off. I should get a second usb drive, and swap them each week, and move the other one off site, except that I don't know where I would store it.

I backup monthly onto CD as well as onto the web.
I am always worried about people burglarising my house and stealing my backup CD's, hence the web solution.

I'm doing weekly backups onto CDR. I'm just backing up the SourceSafe directory. It's easy to verify, since I can just tell SourceSafe to open a database from an alternate location (the CD).

Between SS and user directories, I'm about at the CDR limit though, so I'm either going to have to start using the regular backup tool with compression, or find a different storage medium.

You can't ever be too careful about this kind of stuff, IMHO...re-doing lost work is a nightmare. We have automated scripts that backup certain key drives/folders daily to a dedicated 160GB drive (SourceSafe archives whenever we do a major check-in go here too). We also do regular manual backups to a 120GB removable hard drive that we store offsite at a bank safe deposit box.

I use Xdrive (www.xdrive.com), an online storage provider.

For 4.95 a month I get 75 megs, which is more than enough storage for now. Backups are automatic, and I can have several backups available (eg. always have the n most recent backups available). I can access the files via a web site or a virtual drive on my PC.

There are others online storage providers that are a little bit cheaper, and other that seem more geared towards larger customers (i.e. lots of data to backup), but xdrive was easy to setup and config, and that's the reason I chose online storage: it's very hassle free.

I will definetly make use of a second online storage provider one day (better peace of mind, and they are inexpensive enough), but for now the one is fine.

One big cavet: you really need an always on connection (i.e. DSL, Cable, etc.) to make it truly "set-it-and-forget-it" easy.

David

I've started using Windows XP's built-in backup tool as an interim solution. It's not exactly ideal, but at least it's easier to handle than manual backups.

I can't force myself to trust my data to Windows XP's backup tool, so I'm looking for alternatives. I stopped trusting Microsoft's backup tools when they switched to a different backup software from Windows 95's backup tool. The new software uses a different archive format and does not retain backwards-compatibility with the old archive format -- an unforgivable sin for backup software. I want a tool with an open and well documented archive format if I'm going to trust it with my data.

I do a weekly backup on a multisession CD.

keeping old versions had proved worthy when from time to time i decided i want to try again old ideas or when i tried to be too "adventurus" with my code and saved something that didnt work.

I manually back up my critical files regularly to CDR and put them in the fire box in my office. One of these days I'll start using something a little more comprehensive and automatic. :)

I have a seperate machine on the network in my house that runs SourceSafe, there's an automated task that backs up the source safe databae to zip drive once a week. I check in my code every night, and once in a while I get paranoid and burn a copy of my code to CDR :)

Once you've lost a bunch of code to catastrophic hardware failure, you tend to be paranoid and proactive :)

I use debian based cvs server which has a nice CD-RW drive to burn cds bimonthly. Well, now I only have to develop a robot arm to place the cd in the drive, so I can fully script the process from crontab. :)