Backing up my computer data

It's something we always kick ourselves after the fact. But when time is on our side, we never seem to do it.

At least, I don't.

So far, I've not crashed my computer (touch er, PLASTIC!)

Decided to do at least a half-yearly backup of my files to DVD. A backup of whatever that's on disk at that point in time.

A Digital Data Snapshot.

Half a year may seem like insufficient.

Probably is.

But it's a balance between spending money on storage (I have loads of DVDs, which I find relatively less expensive than buying secondary disks storage or USB drives... but maybe I'll change my mind later).

Anyway, mental note to self: Give myself at least 2 to 3 hours to do the backups.

'Cos it did take that long to archive the file, and burn to DVD.

What I did:

1. Selected the files to backup (normally in a folder)
2. Deleted redundant files and kept the rest (even if it's Work-in-progress)
3. Temporarily moved files I do not want to backup out of the folder
4. Created an archive copy of the folder (I'm using a Mac: see "Finder"). Repeat this for files I want to backup
5. Created a BURN folder. Moved the archived files to this folder.
6. Clicked on "burn" just to check what much storage space is required (I prefer to maximise my DVD since it's a -R, i.e. burn once only)

Ok, just did.

It worked.

Basically it's just a ZIP file.

1. Copy from DVD to harddisk
2. Double click on the ZIP file
3. OSX would automatically unarchive the files

Beautiful.