On Linux it is extremely easy do use rdiff-backup for local and remote incremental backups. When I work, I have a minutely cronjob for my work directory. For the whole system I have a hourly schedule. When I resume work the next day, the previous mess of diff files from the work rdiff target directory is deleted and a new clean "emergency" cycle is started. Losing one hour of great concentrated coding can be extremely annoying and hard to reproduce so this is a cheap way to prevent it. But I guess even an hourly backup would be a good first step for many people.

Remember, a harddisk probably costs less than one day of your work. Or just get an USB stick for the most important bits.

Count me as a another happy user of rdiff-backup. It creates an rdiff like copy of what it's pointed to and deltas of previous changes. Not quite continuous data protection but close enough.

Has anyone got any experience with using Dropbox as a backup service? They provide 30 days of file recovery for free, and for a few dollars a month you can get packrat, which provides eternal point-in-time recovery. Seems like a great use case of a git folder backup?

I've had weird issues with my whole Dropbox getting deleted - in the middle of the night, with my machine off, have never figured out why - and while your Dropbox can be restored through the web interface, it's just one file at a time. In the case of a "mass delete" you actually need to e-mail support and generally wait a couple of days before they restore everything, which is less than ideal.

The last time it happened (the third time!) I wrote some scripts myself using their API to do the restore rather than wait on support. It really doesn't make for an ideal backup solution, though!

I use it like that. iTunes, development, documents, all sorts of things. Easily synced to a new machine if needed.

On top of that I pay for Backblaze, just for a little bit more protection.

Dropbox is not a backup service, it's for synchronizing local folders.