A Twitter chat with Mark Fletcher reminds me that after years of trying, I finally have computer backups entirely sorted out. How’s your backup plan? Hard drives fail. And you need offsite backups too. Bad enough to contemplate your house burning down, but what if you lost all your data too?

For local backup, Time Machine is amazing for Macs. I back up to an external 2.5” USB drive. The 2.5” part is important because it’s fully USB powered, no need for a power adapter. For my Linux box I use rsnapshot. I don’t have a recommendation for Windows.

For remote backup, I am really happy with CrashPlan. There are many online backup products and most of them are bad. CrashPlan is good. It’s easy to configure, it’s very gentle on CPU and bandwidth, and they have lots of good restore options. Plenty of advanced features too; serious encryption, seeding by shipping a drive, even a free social backup. The Linux client is a little wonky but the consumer Mac client is fantastic. The price is reasonable, starting at $18/year.

The one hurdle I’m still overcoming is what to back up. I still have more data than is reasonable to back up, particularly offline, so I have these backup sets that exclude ripped DVDs or whatever. Increasingly I’m thinking that’s a dangerous optimization and that I should just back up everything and stop worrying about it.