Hacker News Reader

Back everything up. Now.

Occasionally try restoring your backups and check that the really important stuff is still in a usable form.

Also, every few months take a few minutes and make sure that you really are backing up what you need.

I had a client a few weeks ago that had a drive failure. We went to restore from his offsite backup copy and found that some of the files he needed weren't being backed up. A quick review of the backup job would have caught this.

And conversely, make sure you aren't backing up what you don't need.

Amen! You only know how painful this is if you've something very important. Not-backing-up cost me, shoot I don't know, at least $4,000 once, and probably more than that.

Also, answer this question: If your home burns down, will your backup still work? I like to have one or two hard copies, and one cloud copy of the most important things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com