Like every experienced developer I know, I tend to be a little obsessive about backups. OK, more than a little. The trouble is, most backup applications are flawed. Backups are a form of insurance. You keep hoping you'll never need to use them; when the time comes that you need to restore a file or an image, however, you may be in for a nasty surprise. I have a bunch of horror stories along those lines Like every experienced developer I know, I tend to be a little obsessive about backups. OK, more than a little. The trouble is, most backup applications are flawed.Backups are a form of insurance. You keep hoping you’ll never need to use them; when the time comes that you need to restore a file or an image, however, you may be in for a nasty surprise. I have a bunch of horror stories along those lines, but this is not the time to tell them.Currently, I’m using a combination of manual file backups to multiple locations, source control with Visual SourceSafe and Subversion, and three backup applications run on different schedules: Acronis True Image, EMC Retrospect, and Buffalo Easy Backup. I have backups on CD-RW, in email, on other computers, on external hard drives, on network attached storage, and on remote servers. I have tried and discarded several other backup applications. For instance, Memeo AutoBackup slowed my computer to a crawl, and wouldn’t back up my Outlook mail stores no matter what I did. Other backup applications that I discarded would either keep too many copies of things I didn’t care about or too few copies of things I did care about. I think the best backup system I ever used was Palindrome, but as far as I know Backup Director disappeared after Seagate bought Palindrome, Veritas bought the Seagate software assets, and Symantec bought Veritas. I still have the SCSI DAT drive I used for Palindrome in a closet, and my DAT tapes in a drawer, but they are basically just taking up space at this point.What prompted me to post about backups is that my EMC Retrospect catalog got corrupted last week. It took a couple of days for me to notice that the nightly backups were failing, and a couple more days before I had the time to trace the cause back to the catalog from the grooming failure that was actually reported. Once I did figure out the problem, it took Retrospect about 6 hours to rebuild the catalog for its 200 GB archive on a Buffalo NAS drive. Is there a backup application that actually works day in and day out without a lot of fuss? Software Development