How do you crash-protect your valuable Data/Music/Movies?

[sqvare]

Taking a line through the hearts broken over lost data on our forum, I thought it might be useful to pool our knowledge on how we protect ourselves against data loss.

Here's how I do it, without NAS or RAID.

For music CDs, rip to PC-HDD:

1. EAC+AccurateRip - Rip CDs to WAV
2. Foobar - Encode to FLAC, create tags

Even though they can be re-created from media or FLAC, I still keep the WAVs in a separate (un-backed-up) directory. The FLAC directories are backed up.

For PC/Laptop:

1. Copy important directories (work, music, pics, movies) onto separate physical drives, internal or external
2. Use SyncBack (free edition) to regularly backup/synchronize the source and target directories

I use Syncback profiles to synchronize important directories between my laptop & PC, and between my PC and external disk. So I have triplets of all vital data at any given time.
I sync every time I add or change anything, usually daily, but at least three times a week.

In the DOS/Win 3x days, I used to use Robocopy (command line), which was pretty powerful too. There were hardcore sysadmins who'd swear by it.

Luckily, I've never lost anything significant to a hard-disk crash, and I've had quite a few over the years! Even if I stupidly delete something without using the recycle/trash bin, one sync operation brings it back!

Oh yeah - I should mention that I sync data+pics+movies+music between PC & external HDDs, but only data between laptop & PC because of the laptop's small HDD.