[LivinLOS]

I used to be really religious about backups, but was very unorganized about being selective..

Now I dont have important data so have a different way of tackling it.. I have my audio on a external drive, and every time I download new audio I burn new CD's.. My CD collection is my backup should the drive fail.

My email system is set up to bounce my email from my own server into gmail for archival.. If I lose it and dont have an outlook backup I can simply find anything in gmail.

Occasional small files I use or may need, scans, text docs, usual my docs type stuff.. I email to my gmail if its something I should keep.

My phone, havent backed up my contacts lately.. Good point.. Will backup to outlook file and send to gmail in next day.. Thats a really important one I have been slack on.

Photos.. Had a near disaster with a HD crash last year.. At first I thought nothing important was gone and a month or two later I realized my photos were on there.. ALL my old snaps of Wifey who has passed !! I was really cut up about it, pissed off beyond words, after finally accepting this disaster, I found they were also on a secondary partition on a laptop (just before formatting it too !!) really over the moon to get them back. Now photos go on DVDR's and good photos go up to my flickr account in full rez.

So just incremental systems for what I need... Mostly I nuke and pave the machine every few months anyway.. That shaprens you into not keeping things on one machine only.