It was amazing, when the hard drive went, I could have lost just about all of the stuff on it and not been too upset, but I had the first four months of Ian's life on there, so it upset me pretty bad.

Not sure if you have a permanent backup scheme, but just having a second hard drive in my machine for nothing but backups has worked really well. I just run a script to update all files that have changed since the last backup, so after the first run it's pretty snappy.

I found if my backup scheme doesn't require a low level of effort, I tend not to keep up with it. Running a script once a day is as low maintenance as it gets.

I've been thinking about subscribing to

http://streamload.com/

Unlimited storage. They just limit you to what you can download. But for $10/month you can download 10GB/month. Not bad.

They allow ftp connections so it would be hard to write a small program/script to compress and upload whatever files up there regularly.

Hey Tim it took me a little bit to figure out who you were. StreamLoad looks interesting but I am not sure I want to spend an extra $10 a month. I think I like the idea Michael had. I was looking at hard drives the other day and you can 256gb for under $125. That way I could have a half a Terabyte of space for under $300. Not that I have that much data to store.

I never could get the dvd to burn last night. I tried to use Microsoft movie maker but I think I am almost out of hard drive space so I kept bombing out, and the other dvd burning software I had wanted me to upgrade to use its picture burning capability. I think I would rather get a new hard drive than upgrade.

Yeah, I just bought a new hard drive for general use, and turned my old drive into a backup drive. So far it's working out really well. I have a bunch of pictures and video of Ian that all backup pretty easily.

With the app I use, you just define the folders to mirror, and then it creates a shortcut that runs all your batch jobs. It's also open source, so if you had the inclination, you could write it to store your data on an FTP server if you so choose.

For me, remote storage is kind of impractical, some of my video files are 2GB or so, copying that up to an ftp server would be unbearably slow for me, but to a 2nd local drive is reasonably quick.

BTW, checkout Digg.com under "deals" you can usually find some sweet deals on hard drives if you wait for a good deal. That's how I found mine.

Take a look at:
www.streamload.com/Account/Pricing.asp

They have a free service, plus a service for $5 a month.

Actually, I was planning on doing this in addition to a larger drive. Setup the program/script to run once a week at midnight(or any other time that you don't use the computer that much).

You don't even have to think about it really. You have cheap automatic offsite backup. You don't have to worry about your drive crashing or computer getting fried or what not. For sensitive files you can use GnuGP to encrypt and then send up.

Plus all I have to do is put a few bits of code and all my project documentation and voila, it's a tax write off.

One central large hard drive is good for day to day access, but for long term storage, I think I'm going with this for the time being. $10? I'll go to Qdoba one time less in a month and I'll call it even.

Oh forgot to ask... What's the name of the mirroring software you're using?

This is your funniest blog post ever!!!!!!

The backup tool I use is here:
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

You can download the source if you want, its a VB6 app.