Backups, and what constitutes "Good Backup Practice"

[DerxwnaKapsyla]

So, I've made a few status updates left and right about it, as well as some venting on the server about it, but recently my External Harddrive met some sort of critical failure earlier this week. On it is a lot of important things; music, photos, games, but most importantly is my own project I've been working on in Pokemon Essentials, Touhoumon Faith & Prayer Version. I was presently working on it when the drive met its untimely coma, and I quickly came to the realization that I lost it (and flew into a complete panic attack and meltdown, and have been suffering from such for the past several days as a result). Thankfully, for better or worse, I did have a backup, but it was 2 weeks old, and was lacking several things I had already did (Maps, events, some new tiles, various other things that I can't remember because my change log is also on the comatose HDD). And it dawned on me - this all could have been prevented if I had better backup practices. But, what exactly does constitute good backup practices?

Even if you're not working on large projects, backing up things is a very good idea. Important text documents, vacation photos, anything that is important to you or contains sentimental value, and of course any smart developer knows that backing up projects is absolutely essential to maintaining some sort of control in the case of an emergency (if only I knew better, I've had this happen to me at least twice now!).

How all do you handle backing up stuff? Do you upload it somewhere online (Like MEGA, Mediafire, or Dropbox), or do you have copies scattered across several different places (An external harddrive, your computer, another computer, upload websites). And for all you people who work on projects, how do you handle backing those up? Do you do the following, do you use Revision Control Software (Such as Git and the like)? I'd really love to hear (so maybe I can learn better next time and not be a dunderhead).

Also, I really do apologize if this is the wrong section, I had no idea where I would post this to begin with, since it's such a broad topic and it didn't feel right just posting it in the Fangames thread.

[mde2001]

I keep all of my stuff for Regal (and previously Industrial) on dropbox. It is just reliable for me. I also keep all of my saves for fan games there.

[Hexagoen]

Using online storage is good and all, but do remember that flashdrives are a thing lol.

Good luck man!

[Ice Cream Sand Witch]

I actually almost ran into the same problem, where my computer was acting up really badly one day and I wasn't sure I would even be able to turn it on again. While this was happening, I thought about how I could lose all of my pictures, games, all the progress I've made on Spork, etc. I remembered that I have a flash drive and was mad at myself for not thinking about that earlier. I did eventually get it turn on (it was just in a bad mood, I guess?) and ever since I've been saving everything important on my flash drive, keeping it updated when I make edits to Spork.