Now please don't shoot me down in flames for this, it might seem dumb to the initiated but I have been wondering about backups and if there is much point in backing up your data to the same drive the original resides on as seems to be common practice. After all if the drive goes on the blink you've lost the original and the backup anyway haven't you? Or is it more a case of backing it up against human error as opposed to drive failiure?

BashTin, with sheilds up

Well I guess it depends what all you are backing up. If you want to back up your configuration files in case you screw something up via messing around in /etc then it would be very handy to have a working backup of all of those config files readily available. Same thing goes for if you run some piece of software that goes all buggy and hoses your /etc, you can restore your config right from that box. So local backups are very handy in case of human, or system errors of those types. A backup copy of important files is like a snapshot that you can go back to or refer to, and can be handy to have on your system. Of course you are right that truly important backed up files must be on a different medium than the same drive that the files were backed up from, but in cases of trying to protect from simple errors and loss of data then backing up on the same drive is a good idea. As is backing up that data on CD and other HDs, but at least it's some degree of protection.

Thanks Read_Icculus

I'd backup your data to a second HD.

With my windows boxes I usually have 2 hard drives installed and I either schedule MS Backup to run or I ghost the drive to an image file on the other drive.

With my linux boxes I just use dd.