Hi
No one should lose anything from "upgrading" their computer. Ever.
Best is to have a regular local backup (weekly maybe) and an offsite backup, taken every few weeks.
Local backups like Apple's "Time machine" or external hard drives with USB or ethernet are good but still need to be supplemented with a regular offsite backup. It is not rare, though not common, for an external drive to fail during a backup and you will lose both. Particularly if you do backups during a thunderstorm :-)
Then for a non-local backup options are Amazon S3, rsync.net or other cloud based schemes. Consider the costs per month and the costs to pull data out. I pay about $10/month for a few hundred GB of data offsite at Amazon. Amazon charge though for pulling data out! while rsync.net are pricier per month but no charge to get data out.
And of course for applications like mail if you use Microsoft's proprietary Outlook database then good luck. I stick with standard mbox format which has been around for decades. I can just copy the files to a backup and restore easily, and move them from Mail client to Mail client, PC to PC. With Mac it used to be open format but not sure now.
Mike
Our car: Fuji White MY13 D4 SDV6 SE 3.0 Litre, 8 spd auto.
My car: Series 2a Workshop, 109 inch WB, ex mil., 1971. To be restored.
Wife's car: Series 2a FFT, LWB, ex. mil., 1966. To be restored.
Bookmarks