Ever had a hard disk die? How about the one with you WoW (and/or any other MMO) data on it. How long would it take you, and how much would it cost, to get it all back?

How long would it take to download all those patches, updates, addons, reconfigure your hotkeys and other characters setups?

DominateYourServer has a detailed guide to backing up your WoW installation. Basically you copy/backup the entire WoW folder set over to your backup system and you’re good.

There are a number of choices for backing up, but none are foolproof. Do two or more if you’re really concerned (or paranoid.)

1. Install an internal hard drive and use it for backups. Just copy data from whichever drive you have your copy of WoW on over to the other drive. This is great if your main drives dies, not so good if your computer is fried (eg: by a lightning strike,) but it’s lots faster than the other methods.
2. Use an external drive. These connect with a USB cable and usually come with backup software. A bit slow, but since you can disconnect the drive after backing your system and then store it in a safe place, you’re pretty well protected.
3. DVDs (and BlueRays) are  cool, get yourself the appropriate software and burn some disks. Then store then in a safe place. DVD burners are pretty cheap, Bluray not so cheap (yet.)
4. Online backup. We use Mozy, but there are a bunch of other services available. You pick the files/folders that need to be backed up and it does it all in the background, making incremental backups on a regular basis. The first backup will take a long time since it will back up everything that you tell it to. Once that’s done then the following backups take a lot less time.
5. Go Raid. A RAID is a set of dard disks which work together. We’re interested in the mirroring function here. You set up to drives to mirror each other and then every bit of data that gets written to drive 1 also gets written to drive 2. So if one or the other fails you have a backup. I’ve seen these fail, so I suggest another backup method as well as this one. Also, this won’t backup your existing data, it’s best done with a new install.

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