I've been saying this for years . . .

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/27/BUAGROA2S.DTL&nl=top

The year: 1993. The place: Bonny Doon. A young Jordan looks dumbfounded at his Macintosh Color Classic that won't start. $70 and two trips to tech support later, and Jordan's data is unrecoverable. (Turns out the problem was a thick layer of dust on the motherboard, which the tech company completely ignored. And thus began Jordan's illustrious career of solving his own damn computer problems.)

In order to learn my lesson, I had to lose all my childhood stories and my entire address book (which included the names & numbers of some cute girls). After that, I started backing up on floppy disk. Those floppies stuck around for another ten years before I finally started backing up on CD. Now Yelena & I have a sophisticated backup system involving two computers and an encrypted Linux network.

"I always back up my data" is something that smug computer nerds love to tell hapless non-nerds when they lose their data. But backing up isn't just for nerds any more. The new version of Mac OS X will have an automatic backup feature. And it's not that hard to do it on Windows, either. Just grab an external hard drive or a stack of blank CD's and remember to do it. There are lots of other things you remember on a regular basis--brushing your teeth, balancing your checkbook. Backing up your data should be one of them.

Like all good "disaster" planning, your backup plan should be thought through. When I was in school I backed up all my data--30 gigabytes, including photos, music, and my precious legal reading notes--twice a day. I took my laptop to school with me every day. That way, if I got mugged in the Tenderloin, I'd still have a copy of everything
at home. And if my apartment burned to the ground, I'd still have a copy of everything on my laptop. Now that school is over all my files are sitting in my apartment. So when I see my mother this weekend, I'll be bringing her a CD for safekeeping. That way, if a comet hits San Francisco and obliterates everything, my data is still safe.

There's no good reason not to back up, and a million reasons why you should. Including the smug satisfaction of telling the tech support guy: "Yes, I have it all backed up."

J