How Often Should I Back Up?

How often you back up depends on what you are backing up, where you are backing up to, and how often you make changes to the files you back up. For critical files, it really depends on how often you are making changes to them. User files and system files should usually be backed up weekly. A good rule of thumb is that you never want to lose more than a full week of work re-creating updates to files that were lost. For critical files, you do not want to lose more than a day (assuming that it is a working file which changes often). If you are using an automated backup system, it is easy to set it up for automatic daily backups, which could save you a lot of time and aggravation later.