I had a disaster that totally rocked me, a few years ago, before CD writers were affordable to the likes of me, i had everything id ever done, including my spectrum games i wrote when i was 12 (stored as .sna files) and my amiga & early PC stuff.
I had everything, artwork (90% in LBM/IFFs, source, imagine/pov stuff) stored on my PCs hard disk and a copy of it all on a removable HDD caddy that i kept in a drawer to isolate it. I also had a copy on my dads computer put there via our home (10mb BNC -lol:) network. So i thought i was pretty safe.
Nope
A virus (cant remember what) totally distroyed my file system and my dads and when i went to recover the one in the draw, it would not get recognised by the bios and made some mechanical noises. I was totally devastated. I gave it all up and took up guitar playing, travelling and hippydom for about 6 years without using a pc for anything other than games and internet.
Learned my lesson there didnt I (call me paranoid if you want but im not loosing it all again!)
So this is what i do now:
Now i have a central Linux file/prn server desktop that has a 3 tier 80GB mirroring system (3x80Gb HDDs grandfather > father > son) that syncs the entire disk (excluding temp stuff) once a week and then a monthly burn down to DVDs that are stored well away from the PC incase of a fire (apartment walls are concrete with 4 rooms in between)
This server serves my windows/linux laptops with a shares for everything (eg, p:\ = programming stuff) The laptops (on the linux partition, not windows) i keep an aditional sync of all the important bits (rather than the whole file system) which i sync each time i need to travel somewhere and sync when i get home again. I also take a few dvds to my dads house back home in UK each time i visit, as an offsite solution (2x a year)
I had everything, artwork (90% in LBM/IFFs, source, imagine/pov stuff) stored on my PCs hard disk and a copy of it all on a removable HDD caddy that i kept in a drawer to isolate it. I also had a copy on my dads computer put there via our home (10mb BNC -lol:) network. So i thought i was pretty safe.
Nope
A virus (cant remember what) totally distroyed my file system and my dads and when i went to recover the one in the draw, it would not get recognised by the bios and made some mechanical noises. I was totally devastated. I gave it all up and took up guitar playing, travelling and hippydom for about 6 years without using a pc for anything other than games and internet.
Learned my lesson there didnt I (call me paranoid if you want but im not loosing it all again!)
So this is what i do now:
Now i have a central Linux file/prn server desktop that has a 3 tier 80GB mirroring system (3x80Gb HDDs grandfather > father > son) that syncs the entire disk (excluding temp stuff) once a week and then a monthly burn down to DVDs that are stored well away from the PC incase of a fire (apartment walls are concrete with 4 rooms in between)
This server serves my windows/linux laptops with a shares for everything (eg, p:\ = programming stuff) The laptops (on the linux partition, not windows) i keep an aditional sync of all the important bits (rather than the whole file system) which i sync each time i need to travel somewhere and sync when i get home again. I also take a few dvds to my dads house back home in UK each time i visit, as an offsite solution (2x a year)