Yes, nothing to do with MINIs; move along if you’re looking for GBMINI … unless you don’t have backups of all your computer data!
Ever since I accidentally deleted all my email a few years ago, and even more so since a hard drive failure on a PC I owned, I’ve been slightly paranoid about backups. Unjustified perhaps, since really nothing on my computer is life threatening to lose …
Music (40GB)
I guess it’s theoretically all “backed up” on my iPod (though attempting to move music from one computer to another from the iPod was very unsuccessful – worst, I could re-encode it all from the original CDs – but that would take weeks!
Photos (40GB)
Many of my photos, arguably the “more wanted” ones, exist here on GBMINI, or over on MargaretAndIan, but they aren’t full resolution – I’d prefer not to lose the originals!
Videos (45GB)
Mostly un-edited, so I could pull them back off the original DV tapes (so long as those tapes are not too degraded)
Documents (<<1GB)
Very little data space – but stuff that couldn’t be re-created. Although I’m not sure how important the source code for a college project from the mid 80s, written in BCPL, is now …
Mail (1GB)
Arguably, I don’t have a backup for this – Gmail has the originals; though Apple Mail has an IMAP copy of everything, I’m not sure how easy it would be to restore to Gmail if the originals vanished! I imagine if the files disappeared from Gmail, then Apple Mail would mirror those deletions …
I no longer trust hard drives, so while a Time Machine backup is very good, a drive failure in the Time Capsule would be bad – so I use Time Machine with a LaCie 2big Network RAID drive! This arguably gives me three copies of my data, the original on my Mac, and copies on each of the two drives in the LaCie – the LaCie lives in the basement …
UPDATE 2017: most of this original discussion is out of date now so I’ve deleted it! My backups these days primarily rely on (a) multiple computers, (b) Apple Cloud backup of my photos & videos (which are the most important data I have), and (c) Dropbox for important documents.
M&I / GBMINI 