Thanks for all the tips. The freezer trick didn't do it for me ... but, I am going to perhaps try the controller trick and then give it up for now. But, the inevitable followup to a hd crash. I had backed up all important data on dvds 3 months back, some of my code is on svn and cvs repositories, and email is on an email server ... but, i nevertheless lost some work related docs and some code ... say about 20-40 hours of work in recreating those. I also had dumbly(?) used my laptop as a cron-scheduled rsync-based backup system for data on a web service (about 15 gb). Now, I need to think of other setups. I am thinking of using amazon s3 for backing up my server data ... Any thoughts on amazon s3 and/or alternatives folks here might have experience with? Data of the order of 10s of gigabytes and growing over time at the rate of maybe 1 gb a month. I am thinking of getting a home desktop system and I could use a rsync technique for keeping copies of my laptop and desktop in sync ... Yet, it seems you would have to burn DVDs every once in a while because there is always the risk of one or the other 'backup' systems packing up. Or is it better to simply get a back up hard drive solely for the purpose of backup and not use it for anything else, in stead of (or in addition to) a desktop? Do people have thoughts on backup strategies -- I suppose this depends on risk appetites as well as how critical the data is -- but what is a typical (not overkill) backup strategy that people adopt when you have a combination of email, code, design docs, personal photos + music, and web service data? Feel free to direct me to an appropriate web site or other forums. Thanks, Subbu. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20071003/d845f449/attachment.htm