Fair Backup

Normally, just scheduling your backups is a good thing. But for how long do you need to store your backup files?

Of course, everything depends on your backup schedule and on the backup medium you use. If you backup every day, you’d rather backup daily during a week, and then only keep weekly and monthly backups (and the recent week ones, of course).

If you backup to a large external hard disk drive, you can be pretty liberal at keeping your backups. Especially, if you backup only your work documents.

In general, using the Grandfather-Father-Son backup schedule (even if you are backing up to DVD or even CD), may be the best one to use - it allows you to not only keep the recent data handy, but to recover from dated data changes, at the same time occupying little space on your backup medium.

In essence, your best bet is to look at everything: what you backup, where you backup and how often you backup (backup schedule). Once you find the comfortable amount of data you can let sit on your backup medium with your schedule, you can determine for how long you need to keep your backup files.