Well said and so true. It takes discipline and consistency but it can be done manually. I never relied on automatic processes except for those set up in a server environment, but they were still attended to and configured daily to run at specific times. Being a former network and systems administrator, I take backups seriously and have a specific routine setup for my important data, mostly being my Trainz content.
Anyway, in my last job prior to retiring, I was a well-respected technician with a big company. I supported many C-level VPs and managers and they used an automatic back up system for their documents. One day I got a panic call from one of the VPs saying that his documents were gone and there was nothing backed up.
I wandered quickly to his office to have a look and sure enough, his documents were off to Bit Heaven somewhere. I could see the panic in his face as he paced around his office in angst. I checked his backup software and the program had gone through the motions of backing up documents for months but actually did nothing almost like a child's toy with pretty buttons on it that do nothing! To make matters worse, upon checking his backup drive, the hard disk had died! This is why the backup was taking seconds and to make matters even worse, there were no warnings, errors, or anything to say that the hard drive was nothing more than a brick.
Using some special software, I was able to "scrape" the last backup on the drive from a month ago off the drive and restore the contents for him and ordered a new external drive for him. With that done, we then sat down for a bit of training on how to copy data using a simple copy and paste the stuff he wanted to keep to his external drive rather than rely on some magic process.
