Procrastinating Will BITE You!

What are the things you know you need to do, but keep putting off . . . flossing your teeth, changing the oil in your car, and backing up your data files? You know that it’s inevitable that procrastinating will eventually bite you and you end up paying more in the long run.
Backups are a necessary evil in some ways. The question of whether or not you should do them is more a matter of when you will have a data loss than if you will have a data loss. The reality with computers is that you will have a loss of data sooner or later. Murphy's Law not only suggests that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, it also adds that when it does happen, it will do so at the worst possible moment.
Now that we've got the inevitability factor covered, how often should a backup be done? It depends entirely on how important your data is and how current it needs to be. Let's say you run a business and you keep business records that need to be absolutely current in order for your business to survive, you need to decide how much data you could afford to lose but still keep your business going and then plan your backups in a time frame shorter than that.
If you decide you can only afford to lose 1 day's data, then you might choose to do a backup twice a day. That way, in any disaster situation, you will only have a half day of work to recreate. If you're using the computer to write papers and essays, maybe once a week is fine. You decide how often you need to backup based on how well you can face the trauma of a data loss.
Doing a backup does not need to be disruptive. Depending on whether or not you actually remove the data to another medium (i.e., archiving) you can actually free up some space on the system. You should not do any other work while a backup is occurring. We recommend end-of-day backups so that backups are a non issue.