How do you back up your development machine? [closed]

Question

How do you back up your development machine so that in the event of a catastrophic hardware malfunction, you are up and running in the least amount of time possible?

Answer 1

There's an important distinction between backing up your development machine and backing up your work.

For a development machine your best bet is an imaging solution that offers as near a "one-click-restore" process as possible. TimeMachine (Mac) and Windows Home Server (Windows) are both excellent for this purpose. Not only can you have your entire machine restored in 1-2 hours (depending on HDD size), but both run automatically and store deltas so you can have months of backups in relatively little space. There are also numerous "ghosting" packages, though they usually do not offer incremental/delta backups so take more time/space to backup your machine.

Less good are products such as Carbonite/Mozy/JungleDisk/RSync. These products WILL allow you to retrieve your data, but you will still have to reinstall the OS and programs. Some have limited/no histories either.

In terms of backing up your code and data then I would recommend a sourcecode control product like SVN. While a general backup solution will protect your data, it does not offer the labeling/branching/history functionality that SCC packages do. These functions are invaluable for any type of project with a shelf-life.

You can easily run a SVN server on your local machine. If your machine is backed up then your SVN database will be also. This IMO is the best solution for a home developer and is how I keep things.

Answer 2

1. All important files are in version control (Subversion)
   • My subversion layout generally matches the file layout on my web server so I can just do a checkout and all of my library files and things are in the correct places.
2. Twice-daily backups to an external hard drive
3. Nightly rsync backups to a remote server.
   • This means that I send stuff on my home server over to my webhost and all files & databases on my webhost back home so I'm not screwed if I lose either my house or my webhost.