>Anyway - backup, backup, Backup!

And make sure you keep your backup real safe - preferably off site, and in a
fireproof container. Even in the garden shed or garage if working at home,
long term in a bank vault, or lawyers safe.

/story time/
I worked for a computer supply company in NZ at one stage. An engineer got a
call at around 4;30pm on Friday, to say a customers tape drive had failed
while doing the backup. Valiantly he sorted out spare parts and proceeded to
the customer site, repaired tape drive, and a backup was duly obtained. That
night a fire swept through the customer premises and destroyed everything.
The backup tapes were recovered from the on-site fire safe, and restored to
a machine on our company premises on the Sunday, and we had their office
staff working in our company premises on the Monday morning. We made good
advertising out of our customer support, and Chubb made good advertising for
it's fire safe, using pictures of the customer premises. The site of disk
packs sitting in a charred heap of ashes must have made many an IT manager
tremble, and everyone knew who the company was, as the fire made the news
because of its size - it was a paint factory IIRC.
/end story time/

>I'd agree, but would add that it's more common to need to
>pull the odd file off a backup because you accidentally
>overwrote it, or broke something by mistake & need to look
>at an earlier version, than from hard disk failure.

This is probably where a case should be made for some sort of CVS system to
keep track of the revision level of each file.

>Create frequent 'earlier versions'. In Windoze this is as easy
>as doing Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V to make Copy (xxx) of....
>Make sure you keep source files for EVERY version released to a customer.

Probably a good scheme. released versions are probably milestones to archive
to something like a CD-ROM which is suitably marked and stored at a separate
site.

>I got an AIT-1 drive and some tapes off Ebay - this does up
>to  70gig on one tape. Ease of use and getting everything on
>one tape is mure important than speed, because you can just
>start it off & leave it to run.

See my story above about fires. Do not make a habit of setting something to
run when you "go home" and then taking the backup media out next day. As a
minimum do incremental backups that you can store separately when you close
for the night.

>Multiple media (CDs etc.) are a pain, and anything that is a
>pain will not get done.

Agreed, but this is where you need to weigh up the backup time versus risk
of what you could loose. If you have to use multiple media items then do it.

>Incremental backups are more hassle than they are worth.

Well see my comments about completing things before stopping for the night,
and remember the fire story above. hey may be usable in the project folder
anyway (see your comment below)

>Keep tapes off-site. I had one customer
>who had their PC and all their backup tapes stolen.

Or in a suitable safe - see fire story above, but agreed, preferably off
site.

>I also keep a floppy/CD of PCB, source files etc. in the
>project folder (physical paper folder, that is!).

This can also be an incremental backup if need be.

Another comment I have not seen so far - make sure you can restore from the
backup media you are using. Just because the tape says it backed up and
verified, it may still have a problem. Can it really be read a week later,
or is the media that badly worn that you end up with read errors? Again
while working with the company mentioned in the fire story above, we had a
customer who had a machine that used 8 inch floppies for backup. Time came
to upgrade to a new machine, and problems were found reading the floppies.
Luckily the backup program had an option that allowed a "best read attempt"
on doing a restore, and would then carry on with the next block. Then many
report generator runs over the customer data weeded out most of the
resulting errors in the data, and the program files could be re-instated
from release tapes, so we were able to recover the situation. The floppies
had been claiming to do a backup/verify cycle without error, the just
"faded" over time.

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