Here's a little post for any of the students or paranoid professionals who read my blog. I am PARANOID about file backup, and as an instructor, I see students lose their work ALL the time. On average, just to quote some facts, I have about 90-130 students each quarter. Of that range, at least 15 are bound to come to me at some point during the quarter and report that:
-Their hard drive got lost
-Their hard drive broke
-They forgot to copy over a file
-They forgot to make iterative saves and the only version they had is now corrupt
-They saved over their good file
-They never backed up at all!
Well, I'm tired of all that. You see, I ran into these problems when I was an undergrad and lost a crap-ton of work of my own, and since then, I have been super paranoid about my backup system. I hit save at least every 5-10 minutes, and I save a new version number of a file usually once per hour. Maya 2011 has a built-in autosave feature that FINALLY WORKS now, so I have been using that too to supplement NOT REPLACE my paranoid ways.
On top of that, I back up my work across multiple hard drives and have systems in place to make sure I never over-write my good copies or transport viruses. I do this through a series of quarantines using my Mac and by (to quote Clerks 2) "never going ass-to-mouth (PC-to-PC)". Although, sometimes in the heat of the moment......
I use ChronoSync for Mac ($40) and TimeMachine (free) to make my copies onto two different Western Digital external Hard Drives. One is a WD MyPassport 500GB (FAT32), the other a WD MyBook 1TB(HFS+), respectively. Both plug into my MacPro(HFS+) via firewire 800 and neither EVER touch each other directly.
I use the MyPassport to transfer to Windows XP/7 computers (NTFS) on our school's campus when I need to transfer work.
I hope you can find this useful.
Here's my backup plan (click for larger):
