For 80% of people, running backups is a non-event. We simply don't consider doing them, not because we are lazy but it just never crosses our mind. Fortunately I had a happy event last week - I ran a full backup of my beloved D610 Dell Latitude's hard disk and not 2 days later the bastard failed on me. It was then I found out how much harder it is to get IDE hard disks for laptops. The 40GB HDD in it was adequate for my purposes and the smallest I could find was 120GB. Now I know how easy it is to fill 120GB of disk with music or movies or whatnot, but in context, I store very little of such things on this notebook. It's for work, and for online stuff such as Google's services and apps. At any rate, I use the wonderful TrueCrypt ( www.truecrypt.org ) to create encrypted partitions and then use the equally handy rsync (or in a pinch xcopy ) to incrementally back that data up across the network to my servers. I thought perhaps I'd share how I do this, using xcop
Angus Beath's Blog - a jotting down of thoughts, handy to remember things and general BS about the world.