> in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups
Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.
> Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD.
Re Apple: this is true only for desktops or laptops. If you want to back up your iPhone you need a Mac to work with a local storage solution. And you cannot configure the Mac to use the HD to store the phone backups directly: the folder the Mac uses cannot be a symlink nor can it be configured. You have to sync all of your phone's data to the Mac, then sync the mac with time machine, which means your Mac needs to be large enough to store all of its data, plus the iPhone's.
I would love to know more about that. I've got a laptop for which there is plenty of storage on a NAS connected via wifi, but the laptop itself has the same size storage as the phone so can't actually backup the phone.
Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.