Make:

Focus On What's Critical
Don't worry about your gigs and gigs of MP3s and ripped DVDs. Find your work documents, your tax info, family photos, etc. Locate all the stuff you can't replace, the stuff that could make you contemplate terminal activity if it were to be lost. Move all this to a central location. I just keep everything important in subfolders of my desktop, but this could be your documents folder, or wherever. Your MP3s and video podcasts go elsewhere. You can think about how to back that stuff up when you've got the important stuff taken care of.

Windows Users - Get Cygwin
Cygwin is a unix-like environment for windows. It'll let you do all the cool things that your mac and linux buddies do out of the box.

• Download and install cygwin


• Set up cron as a service with these instructions

Make and Test a Backup Script
We'll use rsync to do our backups for us. Edit a file called backup.sh and put something like this in it:
#!/bin/bash
rsync -rb /Users/username/Desktop/ /Volumes/External/desktopbackup/
rsync -rb /Users/username/Documents/ /Volumes/External/documentsbackup/

I'm on a Mac, so adjust your paths to match that of your system and the location of your important documents.

The -r flag is for recursive, so it'll copy everything from my Desktop and Documents folders, including all subfolders. The -b flag means backup; rsync will rename all the destination files before copying over the new files. If you are backing up to a network server, you may want to skip this option, since it means the files are completely copied on every backup. I like it, however, because if I accidentally mess up a file, I have an extra day to get it off of backup before it's irretrievable.

If you are copying your files to a remote backup server (ie. rsync -r sourcedir username@servername:serverpath), you need to make sure this can happen in an automated fashion without manual authorization. To do this, you need to add the source machine's public key to the remote machine's allowed host list. Read the ssh manpage or check out these instructions to see how to do this.

Automate It
Once you know your backup script is working correctly, set up cron to run it nightly. Make a file called backupcron, and add something like this to it (make sure to use tabs, not spaces):

#minute hour mday month wday sh
30 23 * * * sh /Users/username/backup.sh

That'll run your backup script at 11:30 every night. Just adjust the time and path to match your system and preferences. Then type the following to add this to your crontab:

crontab backupcron

You can type "crontab -l" to check that it's in cron correctly.

Verify It
You're almost done. Check the backup location tomorrow morning and verify that your backup ran correctly and that everything made it okay and there is sufficient space, etc. You should now be able to sleep soundly, knowing that your important data is finally safe... well, unless your backup server goes up in flames and then someone steals your laptop and your upstairs neighbor's bathtub falls through the ceiling, full of water, onto your desktop machine. But hey, lightning never strikes twice, right?

FYI, my machine finished backing itself up while I wrote this article. What are you waiting for? Get to it!