Backing up question...

[newfiemountiewife]

Here's what I've been doing. Once I organized everything the other day, I backed it all up to Tony's EHD (for which he is eternally grateful LOL). Any time I've bought anything since, I unzipped it, and put it in it's folder on my harddrive, as well as the EHD. I'm hoping this is a habit I can keep up LOL!

[Julie Billingsley]

I'm doing my big backup today/tomorrow. I figure that since it's the new year that I will just back everything up and have a fresh new copy of it all. Then for the future, I will download everything into a file with the month's name. Everything for January will be in the january file until February when I burn them all to DVD/CD and then I will sort them into their correct designer files.

In addition, I am going to be using Mozy. I signed up a while back for their free trial and it seems very very easy. One thing I liked about Mozy is that for all the people that were effected by the California fires that Mozy is willing to burn all their stored info onto DVDs and ship it to them for free. One of my biggest worries is that due to fire or theft that I will lose all my computer, EHD, and backups. So, Mozy is a solution to that worry. I just need to take the time to do the change from the free version to the pay version.

[Penny Springmann]

I received a free copy of Retrospect with our Western Digital EHD. I (DH actually) set it up to run each night at 1 am. My burner is broken so I don't have a second back-up.

[Stacey42]

I back up to DVD once a month. I drop my zipped downloaded files into a 'burn' folder after unzipping them to my 'untagged' file or wherever they may belong in the case of music or program stuff. My photos are sorted by month rather than subject.
At the end of the month I sort through My Documents, My Received & My Music folders by date & burn a DVD with everything in those folders for that month, everything in the 'burn' folder, and everything in that months My Pictures subfolder. If there is still space on the DVD, and there usually is a decent amount unless I buy a lot of audiobooks that month, I put the previous months photos & music on the DVD as well until it is full. Once a quarter I wipe my backup EHD and back up onto it my HD and my main EHD (which holds my digi & audio stuff). Then I go through & delete 3 months of zips & other things I no longer need to keep.

Occasionally I make a copy of my photos, starting from most recent & back to as far as I can get on one DVD and send that to my folks. Everything else I am, to a certain extent, willing to deal with the loss of due to fire, theft, etc. But I do try to keep a copy of the photos in another physical location.

[tracey]

Paula...I wish I had thought of doing a Master list as to what is where on the backup DVD's....I may have to set aside a day or two to do that...thats a great idea!

For scrap stuff..On my EHD, I have my designer folders set up, but also have a "New Stuff Folder"...all new stuff goes in that folder until theres enough for a full disc. After I burn it I move it all to their proper folders. That seemed to be the best way for me to keep up with stuff.

My pictures...they need backed up badly...I am way behind there, I pretty much use the same type system with them, I just don't burn them as often as I should.

[Libby Pritchett]

I"ve been using Mozy for a year now. LOVE IT. Super easy to back up AND to restore files that you may need. I've got 2 EHDs. I use one for things that I'm actively working with (kits and stuff). And I back THAT up to my big EHD (that I only get out once in a while). But everything on my laptop and little EHD gets backed up to Mozy. Seriously, I can highly recommend them if you're looking for a good online back up site.

[Aggie Aviso]

I basically do what Paula does.

Every new kit I have goes to the NEW folder and then gets burned to DVD once it reaches 4GB. I back up to DVD twice labelled A-Z. Each label has its own list which types of kits are in that DVD. (I have a masterlist as well). (What I forgot to do is to have a masterlist of designer and their kits and to which DVD it was backed up to!).

I did this system when I read KSharonK's Back Up procedure in her blog.

I plan to get an EHD for main back up as well. But as of the moment, this works out perfectly for me.