I personally find it beneficial to backup to an online source locally or in an online storage service (as long as encryption incurs etc).

DVD are indeed limited in life.  You are still better off with other offline storage mediums such as an external hdd or tape indeed.

I've found crashplans unlimited storage 10 machine online backup solution to be an excellent solution for desktop machines where connectivity is not guaranteed for cronnd rsyncs etc. Of course it relies on running a fat jar , but it works.

As to uptime, I keep my windows desktops machine online more than my linux desktops just due to how frequent kernel updates occur.

On Aug 30, 2015 7:11 PM, "Michel Catudal" <mcatudal@comcast.net> wrote:
Le 2015-08-30 11:56, Peter Humphrey a écrit :
On Sunday 30 August 2015 00:04:43 Philip Webb wrote:
How long do desktop users typically leave their systems between reboots ?
How long between power off/on's ?

I've long been in the habit of switching everything off while I sleep,
then restarting after I've woken & got going again myself.
However recently, I've run into delays getting my router
(only  1  device attached) to shake hands successfully with my ISP's server,
which have been requiring several power off/on's before it works.
As a result, I've started rebooting only after my weekly system update
-- it means I get to use the new versions of everything --
& not powering off at all ; the monitor + Xscreensaver are off
whenever I'm away from the machine for  >= 1 hr  (approx).

Are there any pro's/con's I sb aware of ?
No-one has yet mentioned taking backups. I'm still using a brute-force
approach, in which I shut down each of my two machines once a week to make a
backup to external disk. Otherwise they're on 24 hours a day running BOINC
projects. On the desktop PC kmail makes a daily archive of messages, and once
a day a cron job copies my user directory to /home/<me>.bu/ .

I know it burns energy but I'm prepared to make my small contribution to what
I think is a good cause.

Backups are vital for a server in company. At work we do a backup every day. At home, it depends how important your stuff is. For pictures you should always copy them on DVD. I regularly backup pictures for people who have ususable windows systems, for them the pictures are the most important stuff but they do not back them up.

Personally I don't like to do regular backups because that involves too many DVDs. I probably should do my backups more often.
I do have 3 2TB hard disks with important data copied on each for redudancy. I also have some backups on a 500G driver which is not powered usually. I also make some backup on DVDs sometimes.
Anything that is of extreme importance I have in several DVDs which I make copies of every few months. I remembered that in the early days of CD that their life was rather limited and am not taking chances on DVD even though I think the technology is a lot better.

--
For Linux Software visit
http://home.comcast.net/~mcatudal
http://sourceforge.net/projects/suzielinux/