Since the birth of my 6 month old, i've been paranoid about loosing his pictures, thanks goodness for rsync -a, simple but it does the job, then another rsync to a spare drive....simple but effective.

"If everyone did proper backups, I would be out of the Data Recovery business. If you've been putting off running such a backup, stop whatever you are doing and backup those files now."

That is a refreshing and noble attitude. If more people thought like that, our world would be a better place. I intend to back up all my text documents and likely pictures also before I install Jaunty in a dual boot on my laptop with intrepid. (always dual boot two 'buntus so I can keep a stable one around.)

No, don't stop what you're doing and do a manual backup. Stop what you're doing a setup an automated backup system, so that everything is always backed up and you never have to think about it again. Asking people to do backups themselves, obviously, not working.

Setting something automatic, transparent and permanent up is much easier than it used to be. Check out stuff like SpiderOak (https://spideroak.com/) and DropBox (http://getdropbox.com/) which do the whole thing for you.

I use SpiderOak and having everything backed up all the time gives me a lot of peace of mind.

No one understands how to do backups or understands that there is a need for them.

These tools need to be built into the OS and prompt you until you set them up, and notify you immediately if the backups aren't being made correctly.

If the client is willing to dish out the money, there's always services like OnTrack. Our company has had to use them multiple times, and are usually able to retreive 99.99% of the data. Basically they do a sector by sector copy to a new drive. They are expensive, so preventention (having scheduled backups) is definitely a better option.

Unfortunate both Dropbox and SpiderOak did not work at all well for me and should not be relied upon IMO.

I tried Dropbox and found it managed to delete files it was syncing (it's 2 way sync which is very different to backup). In fact you can't go back to N previous versions of a file, unlike a real backup tool, and it doesn't handle permissions, hard links, symlinks, or anything not found in basic Windows filesystem model.

SpiderOak looked more promising but I had a whole catalogue of problems: it failed to back up most of one PC's files, and on another PC it was many weeks out of date, without warnings. When I tried to recover files (one PC had massive FS corruption, due to disks doing writeback caching), it failed to work - the client simply didn't pull the files back, hanging for a long time, while the web UI generated a corrupt ZIP for the most important folder (of course!).

The lesson is: TEST your backups, especially if you are using a commercial tool.

Good open source backup tools I have used are:

- DAR - like tar only more reliable and faster for recovery (block level checksums), and supports encryption

- rsnapshot - very fast if you have plenty of disk space, based on rsync. Very easy to set up, and auto-removes old backups in a sensible way

- sbackup - can set this up in literally ONE MINUTE and also auto-removes old backups. tar-based, and also records all installed packages ('dpkg --get-selections').

All of these are in Ubuntu repositories. If you don't have backups yet, I strongly recommend you:

1. Get an external USB hard drive or flash, or ideally a remote server

2. Install sbackup right now (apt-get install sbackup) - run the GUI under System menu and configure it to point to your external drive or server

3. Do an initial backup.

While this is running you can be thinking of a slicker solution that also backs up your entire system, e.g DAR or rsnapshot.