I back up to hard disk via Ghost 9 (highly recommended) and right now the backup is around 50GB with regular compression. That's not a big deal for me since I've got over 800 (~400 free). I'm only backing up about once a month.

But I still like to keep things tidy. So my question: how many backups do/would you keep and why? I want to only keep one. TIA

after my first HD crash ever last month, I do weekly backups of important files.

I keep 3 copies of all my important docs/files. 1 on a dvd, 1 on a cd and 1 copy on my external HD.

Anything else that is not too important or not difficult to get a copy of, I do a monthly backup.

I do precisely what you do, with the only difference is only to dvd and the external hd.

I do make 2 copies of the dvd's, of which one goes to the fire safe once a week or so.

I've had 2 WD's fail on me the past few months, and from the sounds of another WD installed as a slave in one of my pc's, it's probably going to fail soon too.

My external hard drive is a Seagate....I just really have lost my faith in Western Digital.

What size backups do you have? It's really not practical for me to backup on 10 DVDs....

My important irreplaceable stuff is probably 3 gigs total. I really don't save all that much except important financial information, images, tax files and receipts, newly scanned personal documents for archiving, and files from Peachtree....you get the picture.

Most music and video I burn to dvd almost immediately....and I also back that up to the external hd.

I don't have very big "backups" - there's not really anything important on any of our computers here. Well, if there is, we usually print out a copy and file it somewhere and then burn the files to CD. Family pictures and stuff like that are all on CD.

I have alot of data archived on CD & DVD. The same data is also archived on removable hard drive(s). Data that changes on a daily basis (like my Outlook data) gets backed up daily to a removable drive (either a hard drive or flash drive).

I keep data on partitions separate from my boot partition. Makes backing up very easy and if my OS gets corrupted all I lose is a couple of hours to reinstall OS & programs. The data is safe. I don't ghost my boot partition as the configuration keeps changing....I keep adding & removing programs and end up formatting & reinstalling XP fresh every few months. In my reality, having a ghost image would save me maybe 1.5 hours if my system crashes, but the time spent creating the image(s) would be considerably more time consumng.

I put my faith in software RAID. My OS (XP) is on a 15 gig software RAID-0 (mirror); programs ("Program Files") are on a 200 gig stripe (RAID-1) for speed; documents/essential stuff, including windows "Documents and Settings" are on another 50gb mirror. After experiencing a weird corruption with quite a lot of mp3s (trojan!?) about 2 years ago, those now reside on a separate (networked) machine, on a 240-gig hardware RAID-5 array. My data drive (the 50-gig) also gets backed up to this array every night (automated) in compressed/add-only mode, since files on a mirror are still susceptible to human foobar. Never really bothered with optical media per se, even spanning 2 dvds is a pain....so if I ever get a lightning strike, my surge protectors fail and my Antec power supplies do not fail-safe, I am screwed. I should really be backing up essential data at least monthly on DVDs...should fit on 2 dvds compressed at most.

Data files are backed up nightly to an external file server. One a week full, and incremental the other days. Once a month I do a full ghost image of the computer to avoid having to reinstall everything. The disaster plan is restore the latest ghost image and then the most recent data backups.

All of these are on the linux file server built for this purpose. So far so good. This weekend we have to rebuild a laptop, so things will be tested!!!!