smartbackup and "copy newer" rock

[geoff]

Originally Posted by dnanian

I've written a bit about this issue in the "I/O Errors" post at the Shirt Pocket Watch blog. I'm glad you've managed to get a recovery -- lucky.

Rotate two backups, Geoff... I know you're kind of doing that already with the image, but you might want to do it with two partitions...

Unfortunately, the way I use this machine (road warrior), the rotation tends to be manual and thus more failure prone than I'd like, as I just saw. The main problem is that the laptop is not predictably connected to backup drives.

Fortunately, most of the truly important stuff lives on a source control server and is automatically taken care of that way. I think I just became newly aware that there's a small but significant amount of stuff that's not "truly important" but that I would prefer not to lose, just the same.

What's the most fool-proof way you see to keep laptops that aren't on a nice, regular schedule automatically backed up?