Recipe for regular Versioning and/or Backup

[tripnosis]

Here's the scenario: You work all day on PHP and MySQL on your local development machine (i.e. your laptop computer). You retire for the night, the next morning your computer refuses to boot up because your hard disk died.

You usually backup your work to the cloud only once a week (because it's a hassle). So you can retrieve the last save point, but you're going to lose about 3 days worth of work. This should be unacceptable.

So, my question is:

What do you do to get around something like this happening to you? Do you use a versioning system (e.g. SVN)? A cron job?

I considered using Dropbox for storing my htdocs folder, and my MySQL data, however, there are a number of config changes I'd need to make that I'm not comfortable doing -- so I'm going to avoid that.

Note: I don't want to backup all of XAMPP regularly. I only want to regularly, automatically backup the htdocs and MySQL data.

[Nobbie]

I considered using Dropbox for storing my htdocs folder, and my MySQL data, however, there are a number of config changes I'd need to make that I'm not comfortable doing -- so I'm going to avoid that.

In fact, its only a small amount of changes, but anyway, i cannot recommend doing so (for different reasons). I simply copy my "data" (not only PHP Scripts, as well my music scores for example) to the Dropbox regularly (not weekly and not automatically). Anyway, i never had the scenario that my harddisk died over night. It died very rarely and when it happened, it happened "more and more" (getting slower etc.). Usually i changed it before it really died.

I am also running a QNAP NAS, which does backup every week additionally. All that the should be sufficient.

P.S.: I am running Linux and or Windows, sorry, but I dont have OSX installed. Mostly Linux, Windows is only required for my music editor (Capella), which does not run on Linux.

[tripnosis]

@Nobbie: Appreciate the pointers. Thanks. (Actually what happened with me was I poured a full glass of water on my laptop. It still booted up after drying off the next day, but it's got me legit panicked now .)