Scheduling backups

In Gina Trapani's excellent HowTo backup at lifehacker.com/147855/geek-to-live--automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive she suggests 3 folders, one backing up (same files to different folders) nightly, another weekly and the third once a month.
I set mine up slightly differently, and prefer it.
One folder backs up every second night. As it happens, the first time was an even numbered date.
The second backs up the same files, but starts on an odd numbered date (7th Oct, for illustration) and repeats every 4 days
The third also backs up every 4 days, but starting on the 9th.
This way:-

1. There's a backup every night
2. There's never 2 backups on the same night. Given the size of some of my files and the time taken using ethernet over mains, I felt this desirable.
3. If anything goes wrong with a backup I've got between 3 and 6 days before I have to solve it.

The principle could be extended to 4 or more folders - 3 seemed a good balance between backup drive and doc folder sizes.

PS. Ethernet over mains allows the backup drive to be at the other end of the house, just in case. The house is 200 years old, unaccountably built without ethernet.

Unjustified blind faith in technology

More by luck than anything, I found my automatic backups weren't working. And hadn't worked for 9 months...
Having spent perhaps a grand on backup kit over the years (including 440 quid to recover a crashed hard drive) this hurt. In the hope it helps at least one person to avoid similar problems, here's the tale:-

• The backup drive (NAS, at the other end of the house, connected by ethernet-over-mains) needs restarting manually after any power cut. I'd forgotten to do this. (We get a lot of power cuts. I read somewhere that the airport takes priority when suppliers are low, and on balance I'd prefer them to keep the runway lights on. Even if I'm not flying!)
• The backup software didn't tell me. I assume if it can't see the drive (which was still switched off) it assumes I know what I'd doing. And I assumed it would tell me.
• As far as I can tell the NAS drive got full sometime along the way. On previous occasions I'm sure it warned me, but - perhaps coincidentally ...
• The backup software broke.

Bit of a fright, and quite a time sponge to sort through all the causes and get back to some sort of stability. Along the way I found Gina Trapani's excellent HowTo at lifehacker.com/147855/geek-to-live--automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive

When it's a new, strange or forgotten area, I need instructions to start from what I don't know, not what the author does. And she did. Written Jan 2006, the page has had over half a million hits. She deserves every one.