How do you back up your development machine?

Question

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers. Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post. Closed 7 years ago. Improve this 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? JavaScript questions and answers, JavaScript questions pdf, JavaScript question bank, JavaScript questions and answers pdf, mcq on JavaScript pdf, JavaScript questions and solutions, JavaScript mcq Test , Interview JavaScript questions, JavaScript Questions for Interview, JavaScript MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions)

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.