I had an experience this morning that serves as a good reminder why I backup my data, and thought I'd share it here in hopes that it will make at least someone start a regular backup system.

I work on a desktop and a laptop (both Macs) and I'm constantly looking for the most effective way to keep the files in sync between them. I want to always have the latest version of any files on both so it doesn't matter which one I'm working on.

Well, I installed a new piece of software a couple of days ago that does the syncing for me, set it up and scheduled the first sync for last night. I wanted it to copy all the latest files from the desktop over to the laptop so I would have a current version on both.

I must have set something up wrong because instead of syncing all the files from the desktop to the empty folder on the laptop, it went the other way - it synced the empty folder on the laptop over to the desktop, deleting all my websites in the process!

When I sat down to work on something today, everything was gone.

Fortunately, I'm running Time Machine, the automated backup built into the latest Mac operating system. It backs up my data automatically throughout the day so all I had to do was restore from yesterday's backup (before everything got wiped out) and I was back up and running.

I shudder to think of the work it would have taken if I didn't have a current backup. Even losing a week's worth of work would have caused me a lot of grief.

If you're not backing up your data on a regular basis - ideally every day - you need to start. It's not a matter of if you'll have some kind of data loss, it's a matter of when.