Is Time Machine. The best backup software ever.

I don't think there's any Windows equivalent for it. For Linux/Unix I think rsync in a cron job will do the trick. But you have to know, and be comfortable with, the command line and text editors to do that.

"Lots of copies keeps stuff safe." The real way to protect yourself these days is to be profligate with your data. If it's something like playlists, where there's no particular call for privacy, then just do as much as you can to move stuff into the "cloud."

Of course, one of the things about iTunes that's a pain is that it does such a good job of hiding its inner workings from most users that -- its inner workings are hidden. So instead of simple backup strategies you need complex backup strategies, you've got to deal with the inscrutabilities of the iTunes library etc.

Glad to hear there was a happy ending. Gotta love the culture of Web-based tech support (that you wrote about -- what? -- 12 years ago, I think).

re: The more we digitize our existence, the more vulnerable we become to a mechanical shock.

Andrew, I would suggest that you look at this, which is something I first posted last October:

Top Theorists Examine Rippling Economic Turbulence

As the financial sector shifts, so does the reach of the jolt to economic structures around the world. Economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, speak with Paul Solman about chain reactions and predicting the financial crisis.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: The banking system, the way we have it, is a monstrous giant built on feet of clay. And if that topples, we're gone.

Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence and understanding of its properties. (MORE)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/psolman_10-21.html

I would've sent ya an invite, you know, as long as you promised to keep yer share ratio above 1.5...

ahem.

rsnapshot.org

works with one or many machines (windows and macs) as clients.

http://www.pcworld.com/shopping/detail/prtprdid,71541716-sortby,retailer/specs.html

+ 2 500GB 3.5" SATA drives ($70-100 each)

1. Configure for RAID 1 (mirrored)

2. Create a "Users" folder in it, create subfolders for each family member.

2. Redirect the "My documents" folder in each user's profile to the corresponding subfolder. (log in, right-click folder, browse).

- for Windows users only, Mac fanbois please ignore (and TimeMachine won't help with an hd failure, sorry to burst your bubble)

I will start with all your HTWW columns because I can get them easily at my home. I will mail them to you. You need paper copies.

You can save files with GMail (7 Gbs) or Yahoo Mail (unlimited).

Skydrive (by, ugh, Microsoft) offers 25 Gb per account.

Readers may rightly wonder why I am lingering over this sorry tale of a bad hard drive combined with bad backup habits when there are much more important matters to discuss. Don't we all have our horror stories of accidentally deleted manuscripts and other digital era malfunctions?

You're right. We do. There are a million interesting stories out there about the global economy, trade, and the politics behind it all. Instead we get navel-gazing and half-baked Consumer Reports.

My hard drive crashed recently too, and I spent two hours on the phone with a very competent technician in India who helped me get the thing started again. It cost me more than $69, but it worked. Perhaps you'd all be interested in the minutia, along with a dollop of shallow philosophizing that serves as a quasi-justification for my laziness in not backing up files?

Ponder for a moment, dear readers, if Glenn Greenwald would ever write a post as inconsequential as this one.

red_gti2000 has it. Disks are so cheap now, there's little reason not to buy them in pairs and mirror them. Products like the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo make this extremely simple. Of course this doesn't mean you can forget about backups, but it's one more layer of safety.

I've given up on mirroring or backing up my wife's business computer. So, once you're up and running again, try a program like Carbonite. Restoring a 50 gigabyte library over the Internet wouldn't be quick, but for $50/year, no hardware, and pretty simple operation, it's worth considering.

Did you try whacking it a few times?

I am also one with much, much digital media. Over the course of recent moves, I don't even know exactly where half the original physical media is any more.

As such, getting a network drive was one of the best things I ever did. The one I have is a d-link DNS-323, but there's more than a few to chose from. For those unfamiliar with network drives, they are a little box that plugs into your router and can be accessed by any of the computers on your network. There are two big benefits to using them.

The first is that your files are accessible from any computer in the house, regardless of OS.

The second is that they hold multiple hard drives and support RAID. That means that all my files are duplicated on two drives. No hardware failure will cost me any information.

Good post, you should get your own blog. Then you can write whatever you want to, too. If you're really good someday someone might pay you to do it. Then some ignorant flea will regularly add insults to you're comments section about how shallow you are and how this blog that your getting paid to write isn't supposed to be therapy for you.

The column puts the finger on a growing concern. And it also illustrates a common problem: people tend to backup the wrong things. They labor hard to burn gigabyte after gigabyte of recorded TV shows, music and so on. What they really should save are the playlists, filelists and other logs of what they've seen and listened to - in short metadata! Almost any content can already be re-gotten. And with ever increasing ease. As long as we have a reference to it. The good news is that metadata takes almost no diskspace and so backups are cheap and easy.