The geek superego is pretty strong. All of us have internalized the compulsion to back up our work, most often by having overlooked that important lesson at least once and having learned the consequences the hard way. But even strongly compulsive backup is not enough protection. Binary files will often become corrupted, and the result of seven days of religious daily backup of a corrupted binary file is that there are seven corrupted backups of that file.
For key data files, the next step is cross-application backup. In addition to making regular backup copies of a binary file, a regular backup in another format should also be done. If the important item is a brief in WordPerfect format, saving another version of the file in RTF or PDF format is advised. That way, if the original file is corrupted, the text of the file and some if not all of its formatting is preserved.
This is not feasible for all files, of course, but for the key files it can be a lifesaver.
10:07:47 AM 
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