I`m doing my own informal poll asking people, specifically business owners, if they backup their data.

Thanks!

I just checked out AT&T`s backup data service, and will likely sign up soon. For now, I do a simple data backup to a different partition. But the best backup I`ve ever used is a disk image. I reinstalled my machine about a year ago, and it took me three days. I dug out a copy of PowerQuest`s (now Norton/Symantec) DriveImage, learned it, and made some images.

For various reasons, I had to again reinstall about a month later. It took me 30 minutes. Now I`m a convert. :-)

That great Craig.  You`d surprised at the number of small business owners that do not backup - about 32%!

I think you need to add some other choices to your poll. There are a lot of other  "gray areas" between yes and no.  Some people back up data occasionally, but they don`t have a regular system for doing so. Others back up certain data, but they don`t back up everything. Even worse are the people that don`t even know what to do or how they should be backing up their data -- that`s a whole `nother issue.

I back up in several ways. First. I back up using Retrospect (Mac) and then I data copy everything from the main drive to a secondary drive. Then I data copy again to an external drive. Then again to DVD.

Retrospect (weekly)
From Main to Secondary (monthly)
From Main to External (every 6 months)
From Main to DVD (once a year)

I often take about two hours a week to go through and trash unwanted documents or junk. That means I get clean (not a lot of trash) DVD backups. (saving DVD space)

I have lost data in the past. It cost so much money and wasted so much time. Much of my data was unrecoverable even though I took the drive to a company called Drive Savers. They are known for their amazing ability to recover data. The nonrefundable starting price to retrieve lost data was about $1000. Final price depends on how much data was recovered (per MB). I was so grateful when they waved the nonrefundable fee. Evidently they really thought they could do the job, but the drive was just DEAD. No recovery. I do appreciate Drive Savers for doing their best, and not charging for all the time they spent trying to recover even one document from the drive.

A life lesson I hope never to repeat. Now I back up.... and do it again and again and again.

Thanks for the replies on this.

OHDenise is right ... I should have included more choices or scenarios.  What I was after is just an informal show of hands as to whether small business owners take the time to back up their data or not.

On my website, I have a more extensive survey, but I didn`t feel it was appropriate to put it here.