With an impending vacation, today has been backup day.

I created my backup system in July of 2003. It was around that time that the cost of losing data would have become uncomfortably high. As business has grown, I'm more and more happy that this rather compulsive backup regime is in place.

How compulsive is it? You decide.

• Every night, all work documents and email are backed up to my iDisk on the .mac (dot-mac) server.

• Every week, the entire hard drive is backed up to an external hard drive.

• About every three months, all work documents, email and personal mail are backed up to CDs. One copy of each CD is stored here; another is shipped to at least one location off the island.

• Also about every three months, all of the above and some other things are backed up to the free space on my EarthLink Web server. This site only takes up very little of the 300MB I have, so I figured I'd use the extra as backup space.

• And of course, most active and archived work products are stored on the EarthLink server space my teammate and I share. We created this space to avoid dizzyness caused by excessive email attachment syndrome.

It may sound complicated, but because the most frequent parts are fully automated, it's actually pretty easy. And it seems like every other day, I'm either reading or hearing about someone's data loss. I highly recommend such a redundant backup system for anyone whose data means everything.