Backing up

[cat 2]

I have used regular off-site back-ups since 1984. It is extremelydifficult to convince my children to do likewise.My daughter recently had a computer shop, backup everything,before reformat. They inadvertently lost much data.A regular backup is a horrific thing to do. It's useless havingit on the same machine, useless having it on one device, uselesson-line & useless having it in the same building.I have 20 years of irreplaceable data & many thousands of digital & scanned analogue photos.My last back-up took most of the day. How could it? I hear your cry!!Most of that time was spent re-rationalising the data & jpegs.I have name tagged every item so that I can find them instantlywith MS Quickfinder, back across 20 years.All data is burnt to CD-R disks, with double redundancy, (to use a avaition term).Thus I have up-to-date data on the hard drive, up-to-date data on disks in the house and up-to-date data on disk at another site.That my dear friends is why back-up is extremely difficult!What caused me to do this? I once lost months of data, (which insmall business can bankrupt you).Thus I was once caught, & I will never, never, never, neverbe caught again----------probably.This I lay down my pen. (I'm going to back-up this letter!)Peter Sydney Australia