I lost two hard drives today on the same machine, a 120 Gb and an 80 Gb, both mounted externally in FireWire enclosures.
I was in the middle of a big InDesign project and, for reasons I can’t fathom, I backed up all the linked graphic files and the InDesign document to removable media last night. Timely? You bet.
Of course, I lost a bunch of other stuff — applications and the like — and some un-backed-up files. They represent some investment of time more than anything, but still annoying.
So now I am interested in building out a small RAID, perhaps 200 Gb worth. My backup strategy has been haphazard at best: our financial data is backed up offsite as well as internally, so we’re safe there. But backing up Gb of music files, scanned hi-res images, is too expensive to ship to StrongSpace, for example. Disks are cheap enough: 250 Gb for $70 seems like a deal.
Later today, I will look for a primer on the subject: if you know of one, let me know.