Recent power anomalies reminded me that my backup practices still leave a lot to be desired. I have only two kinds of data worth saving and they are both kept in a MSDE and exported easily into two files. These get zipped and copied to another computer every now and then and even more rarely get burned into CD/DVD media.

Of course if you do the backup occasionally you might end up loosing whatever your occasional period was worth of data. The right thing ^TM to do is to backup nightly.

While thinking about what kind of media to use and whether I should write a utility that will handle the backup process I suddenly realized that I have bought Nero but have been using only pure burning application. Sure enough, Nero suite contains simple backup application that is nevertheless just right for my needs.

A wizard and a few minutes later, everything was set up. A trivial batch files invokes osql.exe exporting data from the database, scheduled (using XP scheduler) to run every night around 4:50. Nero BackItUp can be scheduled in the app itself to run about 5:00, will compress the data for you and what's really good will burn the files into a separate directory each time. Depending on the size of the data you might want to use small CDRW (about half the size of normal CD), regular CDRW or a DVDRW. If the data is really important and there's a lot of it, you should burn directly to DVDR and rotate a set of discs, then keep discs on separate locations.

This solution is simple and practically free (you must have bought burning software by now and most include some form of backup app) but will increase you data safety immensely.