"Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores." No, because restores wouldn't have helped Jeff Atwood. You ca

"Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores." No, because restores wouldn't have helped Jeff Atwood. You can backup a database onto the same server that hosts the database, and still successfully restore it later. We should instead be talking about the concept of Continuity of Business. Decide how important it is for your data to continue to be available (constant availability vs. several days downtime vs. don't care if it disappears entirely?), then make a plan that gives you that availability. What I'm describing isn't necessarily complicated. For example, I keep all my backup data (photos, music, etc) on a USB drive. Every morning it's rsynced to a hot spare. Every few weeks, I swap the spare with another one in a safe deposit box at the bank. (This means that we can recover from both immediate accidental deletions, and also ones that we don't catch for a few days, and disasters like theft or fire). I check every few days to make sure the drives are still working, and my wife knows how to switch the drives and has a key to the safe deposit box, just in case something happens to me. Anyway, we feel that these are appropriate steps for protecting the data that we don't want to lose. But the important point is that everyone should make a plan that's appropriate for them.