So, you’d think that being a web designer and having to rely on the countless psd files I create for designs, thousands of fonts I have download as well as the brushes, textures, stock images and other various files that help me run my business, I’d actually have a back up of them somewhere – I don’t.
Until today, that is.
I spent the evening last night (until about 6am) working and realized, what the fuck would I do if something bad happened and my computer crashed? I’ve got a few open client projects as well as my own personal projects that I don’t have any type of back up for, and would cost me a shitload of money if I were to lose the files.
Today I went to Wal Mart and bought the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB external hard drive. No, that’s not my affiliate link. This thing is awesome, and knowing that my actual computer hard drive is only 40GB, yes, 40GB, I am happy to know that I will not have to worry about space any time soon.
My plan is to take the folders I need to back up (all on my desktop for easy usage) and copy them to my external hard drive every night after I am done, so when I wake up in the morning, the files are all there and saved. And for the items like brushes and fonts that I don’t update, I’ll make a copy of them and only back them up again when I download new items for those folders.
In the future, I want to get another hard drive and have it as an extra back up. You never know what can happen, and I’m just happy to know that right now, I’m taking steps to ensure my files are secure and safe from problems or random loss. If there’s one tip you can take away from this post, it’s that you need to back up your files. I just spent too long without doing it, so learn from my dumb ass and actually back your files up now 
Good things you have figured it out. The fact of losing all of your hard work is very depressing. I had my experience.
I finally had to take the same step and picked up a 320 GB Seagate portable drive because I was running out of space. So I transfered all my data (only apps left on c: drive) to the drive. After a month or so of having nightmares about my portable drive failing (I’ve heard stories) I finally sucked it up and signed up for off-site backup. Not a week later, my system & drive were overtaken by the nastiest trojan I’d ever encountered.
So…just throwing out there, for only a few bucks, it’s also a good thing to have an off-site back-up. Either via an online service, or something you physically take to another location. Saved me most of my panic (of course, I still stressed over the time lost on fresh installing everything).