The last disk drive crash I had....

Well, the only one I had was the church's main computer where I had stored all the text for songs for the overhead projector.  (The church had their mailing list.)

I still have stuff on my current hard drive from DR Dos and Win 3.1.  Every time I upgraded disks I copied the disk to the new one.  When I upgraded the OS, I'd zip the old files in case I needed them (and I did when I just recently upgraded from 2000 to XP). 

I have tried to delete old stuff, but maybe I need a harddrive crash to get me to start all over.

Until I started working at home in 2002, the only thing I really needed backed up was my Quicken data.  Now I have tons of pictures (most backed up on CDs and DVDs and distributed around the country), and all my files for web development (which are currently backed up as of 3 months ago on the drive left over from the last hard drive upgrade).

I almost lost it all, not exactly from a hard drive crash, but from my killing  the EIDE controller on my motherboard by managing to install DDR memory backwards.  Fortunately the harddrive survived.  Although my main drive was a SATA at the time.  Oh and the reason I got a SATA drive was because my old harddrive would boot only 1 out of 3 tries, just constant rebooting the other 2 tries.

Back in 2000 I did start to have a backup plan using a tape drive, except with the expansion of the hard drive it started taking up more and more tapes and the procedure was so quirky that I quit - after all I really didn't need a back up for just Quicken data.

So what is my back up plan?  I have a DVD writer that I have never used because I don't have good software for it (I stole it out of a computer that the disk for the dvd software was only usable on that computer).  I do need to have a plan in place soon... before disaster strikes...

Any one have a good back up plan?