It's worth mentioning that, if you're not doing regular backups of your hard drive, storing something on your hard drive as a "backup" is a gargantuanly bad idea. Use AWS or some other redundant cloud solution; the likelihood of Amazon shutting down AWS within the next <X> <time unit>s is a lot smaller than the likelihood that your hard drive will fail in the same timeframe.
I would hazard to guess that a lot of people reading this are very capable of creating a backup system, but they 'don't have the time' to either implement it or double-check that it's working.
A lot of smart people who deal in abstractions (like computing) are paralyzed. They have understanding how to do a task, but never seem to have the motivation to follow though. Especially if the task has no immediate reward, or no obvious indication that the task is done.
That might be true - but in my little corner of the world, Apple have solved that problem for their users, and even most of my least technical friends know the importance of keeping regular backups and Time Machine has reduced the friction enough that proper backups are the rule rather than the exception. I also see a significant number of friends/colleagues in the Linux camp telling people how they've got backup regimes that work "just like Time Machine", so I think the effect of Apple having shipped a "good enough and very easy-to-use" backup system has further reaching consequences than just people running Apple hardware - when people have Macs at home with Time Machine, they ask difficult questions at work when the IT people tell them recent revisions of their files aren't available…
Going forward, I see Dropbox or something like it making "backups to additional local spindles" become quaint and anachronistic. Why backup to an external drive next to my computer, when "the cloud" arranges to have copies (and archives) of all my data on multiple machines I own, as well as on Dropbox's (aka Amazon's) servers?
I agree concerning non tech people. From my experience, they start doing back-ups once they lost a disk.
However, considering how ridiculously easy it is to set up a simple rsync script, I doubt that many tech people do not do backups. Even though proper backups include frequent integrity checks, just setting up a rsync script gets you a long way already. If your data is encrypted though, a flipped bit might cause havoc already, thus making frequent backup integrity checks absolutely mandatory.
Sysadmin here; I've set up Amanda (and those damn disk "tape" rotate scripts) and Crashplan before, and both are currently broken (mostly due to the awful high failure rate of WD and Seagate "green" drives)
Really? I have lots of WD Green's and none have ever failed me. In constant operation (however, mostly parked and idling) since the first generation came out. With me for a long time, they're been around the world. What do you suggest instead? Where do you see problems? I guess my usage profile is very different from yours..
