I have two sets of backup disks, which I rotate every Friday. One is a backup of my media drive, and the other of my startup drive. I use hard drive mechanisms in a disk dock, so the disks are easy to transport up and down the two flights of stairs. Since I have two sets of these disks, one stays in the safe, and the other stays on my desk.

During the week, if I make any major changes to my music collection (rip a lot of CDs, buy anything new), I run a backup of my media disk. I keep that disk in the dock, and turn it on whenever I need to back up my music. Then on Fridays, I switch with the safe disks, and run a new backup over last week’s backup, to make sure my music collection is safe from data loss.

It’s good to have backups; it’s better to have multiple backups; but it’s even better to be sure of the integrity of your backups. It would be terrible to fetch a backup disk in a time of need and find that it can’t be read. So I regularly run on my backup disks, just to make sure they’re in good shape. Also, every six months or so, I erase my backup disks (not all at once, of course), and recopy all my data. This ensures that no files are affected by bad blocks on the disks. Finally, I buy new hard disks every couple of years; I don’t trust the long-term reliability of anything mechanical, and newer disks are faster, cheaper and have more capacity.

Is all this enough? Perhaps not. In the competition to see which contributor is more paranoid about their data, I feel that I’m a few lengths ahead of . I’m especially concerned about the value of my music collection—not only the music I’ve bought digitally, but the thousands of CDs I’ve spent as many hours ripping, tagging and managing.